. What does it mean when a dictionary says: “Origin unknown”? We will soon see that the concept of “unknown” has several levels. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Once again, my thanks are to Dr. Goranson. He succeeded in putting together a short biography of Frank Chance, my hero, whom I discovered many years ago (and learned to admire), while working on my bibliography of English etymology. His almost total obscurity today struck me as an incomprehensible slight. Dr. Goranson’s letter will be appended to the post next week. I also received a query from a reader about kayfabe. Alas, though I know something about the etymology of box/boxing (see the post “In and out of thebox”), I cannot say the same about kayfabe; not a single publication on this word appears in my database. I should repeat what I have said more than once: my expertise depends on the huge database I have amassed, and when I draw blank, I appear as ignorant as any non-specialist. I know about kayfabe only what anyone can find online.
This post is about a related subject. What does it mean when a dictionary says: “Origin unknown”? We will soon see that the concept of “unknown” has several levels. The verb baffle, the subject of today’s post, has been investigated in an exemplary way in dictionaries and in both old and recent publications. Yet the OED’s latest verdict, despite the helpful notes, remains unchanged: “Origin unknown.” If so, let us look at what is known. Can everything be enveloped in impenetrable obscurity, like what you can see in the header, with a man lost in a forest?
Baffle turned up in English texts toward the middle of the sixteenth century, and rather probably, it was coined or borrowed around that time or a hundred year earlier. At that time, its recorded senses were “hoodwink, confound.” Scotch bauchle, which predates baffle, meant “to disgrace,” and it remains unclear whether we are dealing with several senses of the same word or with two different verbs. This detail of its history will indeed remain unknown or at least uncertain forever, though it is more probable that, regardless of the chronology, the same sound complex suggested to speakers several different negative associations.
The earliest English etymologists searched for the Greek originof baffle or tried to isolate the prefix be– in it. In 1766, Samuel Johnson thought of the French origin of this verb but went no further (etymology was in general not his forte). Almost a century later, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s predecessor in the field of English etymology, wrote a paper that contained a well-informed section on baffle (the earliest attestations and Romance cognates or lookalikes) and came to the following conclusion (his spelling is retained): “The origin of the Sc[otch] bauch, bauchle is, I believe, the interjection Fauch! Baw! Pah! Pooh!, Fr[ench] Bah! Pouah!, Spanish] Baf! all of which are representations of the strong exspiration accompanied by a projection of the lips, by which we instinctively defend ourselves against a bad smell, and are consequently in the first instance expressive of physical disgust, and then of contempt. ‘Buffa, the despising blast of the mouth that we call shirping.’ Thomas. A.D. 1548… Hence also Port[uguese] bafo, breath; Prov[encial] O[ld] Spa[nish] bafa, mockery jest; Sp[anish] befar, It[alian] beffare, to jeer; Fr[ench] baffler, to mock. From the notion of mocking to that of frustrating the effort of any one, in which the En[glish] baffle is now used, is an easy transition….” A few more examples follow.
This is a buffoon. Enjoy. Illustration by Harry Furniss. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Wedgwood, an excellent observer of speech, ruined his otherwise useful etymological dictionary of English (the above quotation is not from that dictionary) by relying too heavily on the similarity of words from various languages and ignoring sound correspondences. Yet many of his conclusions still stand, and what he said about baffle sounds convincing, as also shown by the opinions of the Romance scholars who dealt with the items Wedgwood mentioned.
In Romance, numerous words beginning with baf have a very wide range of meanings: they denote “to breathe,” “full stomach,” “puff up, bloat,” and so forth. Its “relative” is buff (buffo “comic actor” and its twin buffoon belong here). According to a unanimous agreement, such words are sound-imitative: biff, baff, buff…. Baffle rather obviously belongs here. The best proof of theonomatopoeic origin of the root we are discussing is the existence of MiddleHighGermanbeffen “to bark.” Beff-beff (older German), gav-gav (Russian), or woof-woof (English)—the result is the same! Dictionaries also cite Dutch baffen, Modern German baffen and bäfzen, alongside Danish bjæffe and Swedish bjebba “to bark.” By the way, Engl. baffy is a kind of golf club, while Scotch baff means “to strike.” In blind-man’sbuff, buff means “blow, stroke,” and in Russian, a gun goes pif-paf.
What then is “unknown” about baffle? The answer is clear. The same or nearly the same sound complex has been recorded all over Western Europe, more importantly (as far as we are concerned) in French. The unanswerable question is whether baffle is native or borrowed. Similar questions recur again and again, especially with regard to slang, expressive words, and the names of popular tools.
Beff-beff. Barking dog by Antonio Tempesta (1555-1630). Public domain via Nationalmuseum Sweden on Wikimedia Commons.
In the sixteenth century, wars never ended in Europe (surprise, surprise!). Mercenaries, native and foreign, were everywhere, and so were prostitutes and vagabonds, following the troops. Despite the unrest, merchants and artisans traveled all over the continent. Foreign words were adopted (and often distorted), sometimes forgotten, and sometimes retained. A few of them survived only in regional speech, others managed to stay and even infiltrated the language of the educated.
Baffle, a word of unquestionably imitative origin (and thus, an expressive word), may be native or borrowed. Seven centuries ago, it probably belonged to the common language of the lower classes. Germanic speakers recognized it as their own (when we speak, we don’t think about the etymology of the words we use!), and so did the speakers of the Romance languages. Baffle and its lookalikes may have been native in both English and French (!), or perhaps they were migratory words (Wanderwörter, as they are called in German), part of international slang (see my blog for August 22, 2012, on ajar and migratory words). It is an important detail of the verb’s history and theonly one that is beyond reconstruction. From this (and only from this) point of view is baffle a word of unknown origin.
IT is certainly baffling! Photograph from the Archivo General de la Nación via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
I believe that verdicts in dictionaries should be more nuanced. (In this case: “Baffle. Sound-imitative. In the early Modern period, similar sound complexes were current all over Western Europe, and it is impossible to decide which words of this type are native and which are borrowed.”) Some words are indeed so obscure that nothing at all is known about their prehistory. Baffle does not belong to this group of etymologically impenetrable words.
As I expected, Dr. Goranson did dig up some information about the mysterious F. (Frank?) Adams, celebrated in the previous post (see the comment following it). Yet we still don’t know where this man acquired his vast and accurate knowledge of etymology. He was an amateur, but such a learned one! It is amazing how much nonsense people have written and keep writing about word origins. In this case we are not dealing with a professional linguist, but his observations deserve nothing but praise. By the way, Frank Chance, whom I also mentioned last week, was a medical doctor. My attempts to learn something about him produced almost no results. JamesA. H. Murray and Walter W. Skeat treated him as their equal!
I also received a letter in connection with my last week’s note on the regional word rowen “aftermath.” Is the tree name rowan “mountain ash” related? No. Rowan was borrowed from Scandinavian. By the way, the tree is famous in Old Scandinavian mythology (it saved the god Thor from drowning) and elsewhere, because of its red berries in winter, and the word rowan may provide a clue to the mysterious curse aroint thee in King Lear and Macbeth. See my post forFebruary 20, 2013. TheOEDonline has no trust in this or any other etymology of the obscure phrase. Yet this derivation of the curse may not be so bad. Finally, a long letter came that I’ll answer next time.
Seeing red? Photo by Oscar Portan. Public domain via Pexels.
And now back to business. The history of color names presents countless problems, and the literature on the subject is enormous. Today’s post is only about some curious uses of the word red in English. One of them (in the phrase red gold) I discussed in the essay for October 26, 2022. But first, some notes on the etymology of red may not be out of place.
Word historians encounter two difficulties: either the facts at their disposal are too few, or they are too numerous. This trouble (paucity versus excess) is of course familiar to all researchers. The cognates of red are ubiquitous in the Indo-European world, but the sought-for ancient root emerges in too many forms. The word sometimes ends not only in d/t/th (which is fine) but also in b, f, and s. Also, the vowels alternate rather wildly. Given some finagling, there is of course a possibility to reconstruct a common protoroot, but one wonders whether such a root, valid for the entire language group, existed. It has therefore been suggested that we are dealing not only with a group of related forms but also with a so-called migratory word, a word that travels from language to language and changes its shape along the way. We’ll never know the truth.
To complicate matters, references to the color do not aways match: some of the words, seemingly related to red, mean “light brown.” The history of color words is, in principle, complicated, because at one time, people visualized a spectrum, partly different from ours. Homer’s wine-colored sea is perhaps the most often cited example. Nor is the modern picture of the spectrum quite uniform. For instance, English has to do with the phrases dark blue and light blue, while Slavic uses two different adjectives for them. Likewise, English has a most confusing adjective bleak, not related to black. Though red is the color of fire, its root seems to be the same as in rust.
No message, just an image. Photo by shimo yann. Public domain via Pexels.
However, my story today is not about the ancient root of red. While looking through some comments on my old posts, I noticed that the most enthusiastic of them were devoted to idioms and mysterious compounds. Hence a few notes on the word redneck. The first note at my disposal, by Sterling Eisiminger, is from the periodical AmericanSpeech 59, 1984, p. 284. The reference is to pellagra. The OED online refers to the same source, so that I’ll reproduce only one sentence: “…in the 1930s pellagra was still common in the southern United States among low-income groups whose diets consisted mainly of pork fat and hominy grits.” Hence perhaps the reference to the skin color of the neck.
But redneck also meant “union member,” especially so in the twenties and the thirties in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and southern Illinois and Indiana. Here my source is the same periodical, but volume 69, 1994, pp. 106-11(the author of the article is Patrick H. Huber). Though this source is also known to the OED, I will supply a few details, because the OED online is not open access. We read that the origins of redneck “union man” remain uncertain, but that the word dates back to at least the turn of the twentieth century. It may be an analog of words like cracker (an offensive term for a poor white, etc.) and hillbilly (on hillbilly see my post for March 11, 2026).
The derisive term redneck was also applied to the members of a popular trade union (red, “Communist,” etc.) and, as we are told, with a side shot to the members’ poor, rural-South backgrounds, since so many Kentucky and West Virginia miners were failed farmers and former sharecroppers and agricultural laborers from the outlying rural areas, particularly from the Appalachians.
Especially important is the fact that the term referred not so much to the people’s red sunburned necks as to the red handkerchiefs they wore around their necks. Bandanas, traditionally worn as a form of protection for railroad men, miners, and others, became a badge of honor. Here are the opening lines of the once immensely popular song: “Red Necks, keep them scabs away,/ Red Necks, fight them every day.” The term Redneck became “a badge of working-class solidarity and pride.”
This story does not mean that redneck has “multiple etymologies” (one can often find reference to this phantom). Words, like most rivers, have single sources, though later, tributaries may enrich their content. This probably happened to redneck: first, a literal sense (now forgotten), then figurative accretions. Here is the final statement by the author of the article on redneck: “…the United States labor movement’s adaption of the term redneck speaks powerfully to the fluidity and multiple meanings of language and to how those meanings are socially constructed and interpreted differently by people whose class positions differ.” Red seldom occurs in English idioms. The most interesting of them are to be in the red and to draw a red herring across the path. The curious phrase thin red line originated from the Battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War on October 25, 1854. However, the original dispatch, as Elizabeth Knowles pointed out, mentioned streak, not line. Red, White and Blue probably needs no comment.
This is the famous rowan, red berries and all. Mountain ash by Norbert Nagel. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured image: Little Red Riding Hood c. 1862 by Gustave Doré. Photo by Chris Olszewski. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Recently, I went to a talk on telicity in verbs. If the term is unfamiliar to you, you are not alone. It comes from the Greek “telos,” meaning “end goal,” which is also the root of the philosophical concept teleology. The terms telic and atelic were first applied to French verbs by a scholar named Howard Garey in a 1957 article in the journal Language.Telic refers to verbs that are directed toward an endpoint or goal, while atelic refers to verbs that are actions without goals. So, if you were to say Emily read The Handmaid’s Tale, you are implying that she finished it: there is an endpoint—that last page of the book. Similarly, if you say Emily walked home, the verb is also telic, the endpoint being home. However, if you say Emily read in front of the fire or Emily walked after dinner, the actions are atelic—there is no specific goal expressed and no endpoint to the reading or walking.
The distinction between telic and atelic can be made somewhat sharper if we add in some prepositional phrases to express timeframes and time spans. Saying Emily read War and Peace for an hour suggests that she did not complete the book, perhaps giving it up or pausing to do something else. However, if you say Emily read War and Peace in an hour, the verb is telic, expressing formidable speed-reading. Generally, atelic verbs stress some activity, while telic verbs stress an accomplishment. To play chess is atelic—an activity. To win a chess match is telic—an accomplishment.
Notice that, unlike the familiar verbal aspects of English, telicity is not marked on the verbs. In English, there is no auxiliary verb or suffix signaling telicity. And while there are some verbs—such as arrive, crash, disappear, or find—that are always telic, and some verbs that are always atelic—such as ponder, chat, loaf, or wander—the nature of the verb’s object plays a crucial part in whether a goal is expressed. Telicity is thus usually a property of verb phrases and the actions or states they express, rather than being a property of verbs themselves.
Telicity is inherently interesting to linguists, of course, and there is a growing scholarly literature on ways to model the semantics of telic verbs and on some of the puzzles surrounding their interpretation. What, for example, are we to say about verbs that express actions that occur by degree, such as cool in The soup cooled? Is there an end state or not?
Telicity is of interest to writers as well, despite its esoteric nature. Being aware that some verb phrases imply end results provides a perspective on sentences such as these:
I’d like to dialog with you about your behavior.
I’d like to have a conversation about your behavior.
I’d like to explain the consequences of your behavior.
In the first, the verb dialog suggests talking with no endpoint in mind just a lot of back-and-forth talking. In the second, have a conversation implies that the conversation will not last indefinitely and will hopefully resolve something. In the third, the telicity is even more apparent: the explanation is the end goal.
Or consider a bit of culinary advice like Cook the meat versus Cook the meat until the internal temperature is 165 degrees. There is a goal and end point in the second, and less room for guesswork.
And finally, if you are enumerating your goals for the upcoming year, you might say I will continue working on my book about Milton or I will finish chapters 3 and 4 of my book on Milton. Your dean will prefer the telic version, but you might want to leave some wiggle room with the atelic one.
Understanding telic and atelic predicates is a good goal for writers to have.
First, two notes in the aftermath of the previous post. 1) My thanks are due to Stephen Goranson, who, as I expected, did find out everything about Thomas Bee, the gentleman, mentioned in last week’s essay on boxing. Mr. Bee discovered the origin of the phrase to boxthe compass. As usual, I wonder how my old friend Stephen Goranson manages to ferret out all kinds of information, because I also try to do some research along those lines and invariably fail. 2) I am equally grateful to Mr. Gavin Wraith, who asked me why I had not discussed Greek pyx “fist” in connection with box. This connection was noticed long ago. The problem, as JamesA. H. Murray already knew, is a late attestation of the English word box. As a cognate of box, pyx does not look promising either. Perhaps box indeed originated in university slang (from Greek to English), but this hypothesis is hard to substantiate.
My story today is about several words referring to aftermath. All of them have a rather confusing sound shape. Thus, aftermath is transparent to an etymologist but not to a modern speaker of English. The component –math goes back to a noun meaning “mowing; crop mown.” This noun still exists in modern British dialects, with the suffix –th being the same as in growth and truth. The correct explanation of –math can be found in all detailed dictionaries of English and online. Usually, the root, followed by –th, is changed beyond recognition, as in birth, filth, and death (here, the roots are easy to see in (to) bear, foul, and die). A synonym of aftermath is British regional yeomath. The prefix yeo– means “additional.” I was probably the first to recognize this prefix in yeoman (see the post for June 17, 2009). The OED online seems to concur.
In the aftermath of a twister. Parkersburg, IA. Aftermath of a tornado by Barry Bahler/FEMA. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
As I said, for some reason, English words for “aftermath” are usually obscure from the etymological point of view. Such is also the case in Russian. For those who know Russian, consider the dialectal words shutyom, probably meaning “an empty space,” and otava “a place left to rest.” Both nouns are stressed on the second syllable, and the origin of both is opaque to modern speakers. I have mentioned Russian for a reason. One Russian word for “fallow land” may, as I believe, throw light on its English synonym. I made this point in the post for November 9,2016, and would like to repeat my idea here. English fog is, most probably (and such is the common opinion), of Scandinavian origin, even though it surfaced in English only in the middle of the sixteenth century. But we now know that this chronology is not unusual. The Scandinavian invasion happened in the epoch of the Vikings(King Alfred fought the “Danes”). Yet it took some northern words, which flooded dialects, hundreds of years to emerge in written and printed texts.
This is Foggy Bottom. “Fog everywhere”,” as Dickens put it in Bleak House. Photo by Turbothaddeus. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
King Alfred the Great fought off the Danes, but Scandinavian words are still all over the place. Alfred the Great by George Vertue. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Another fog, which can be very broadly glossed as “aftermath,” has been known from books since 1400. No doubt, we are dealing with the same word as fog “mist.” Or perhaps some doubt exists, because the senses seem incompatible? Yet the common denominator of both words is “moisture,” and here one Russian phrase comes in most useful. An unsown field is said to be “under vapor” (podparom). Fog is, most probably, related to German feucht “wet.” By the way, old etymologists, who liked to trace words to their ancient Indo-European roots, reconstructed the root of fog as bhu, a typical sound-imitative complex (an onomatopoeia for a puff of air). English fog “aftermath” means “under vapor, wet.” Even the best historical linguists cannot know all languages in detail. Not unexpectedly, English, German, and Scandinavian etymologists never came across the Russian phrase pod parom, because otherwise, they would have detected the connection, so obvious to me, long ago and would have used it to substantiate the idea that fog “heavy mist” and fog “aftermath” are indeed two senses of the same noun.
Why, I may repeat, do people keep coining such hard words for “aftermath”? Here is one more example: eddish “aftergrowth, stubble.” The root of this noun seems to mean “again,” as, for instance, in eddy. I would probably have left this gallery of etymological riddles in peace if among my folders I had not discovered one, devoted to the word rowen. Here is a note by a man from Madison, Wisconsin (Notes and Queries, 9/VII, June 8, 1901, p. 453): “Aftermath, or second mowing, was not used by New England farmers in the last century. Rowen was their term, derived, doubtless, from those eastern counties where their forefathers lived. Nor has rowen been yet displaced.” Does anyone among our readers know this word? My computer fails to recognize it.
A lively discussion of rowen preceded that note, but I have brought it to light because of the letter printed on the same page. Its author, Mr. F. Adams, did not only debunk a “ridiculous” derivation of the word, given in a respectable English dictionary, and referred to several foreign dictionaries and scholarly publications: he cited the correct date of the first occurrence of the word in English texts and proposed the etymology that still stands, namely, from a word, related to French regain. It “had filtered into our language through a French dialect, w for hard g being common in the north-east of France.”
Who was F. Adams? He sent numerous excellent letters on word origins to NQ between 1892 and 1903 and does not seem to have contributed to any other periodicals. At that time, an English-speaking specialist in word origins could not wish for better exposure: “everybody” read NQ. The great Walter W.Skeat appeared there hundreds of times. But soon after the First World War, its popularity waned. The journal did not die (it still exists) but became more specialized and less “popular.” In this blog, I have often referred to Frank Chance, an outstanding etymologist, who, like F. Adams, never sought another venue for his ideas in addition to NQ and as a result is now almost forgotten. Those who have read my review of a recent book on Webster Unabridged (April 8, 2026) will see that the otherwise well-informed author called NQ an obscure provincial periodical.
At one time, NQ was a famous outlet, and I hope that Dr. Goranson will enlighten us on the career of F. Adams (what a terrible idea it was and still is to use only the first initials in the signature! In references, I have often seen female authors taken for males and namesakes confused). This is the end of my today’s travel through fields left to rest. Along the way, we have encountered many forgotten words and observed once again how rich the English language is and what problems etymologists face. A good aftermath indeed, if you ask me.
Featured image: Fallow land near Dale Farm by Bill Broaden. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Today’s story is about boxing (that is, about the word box). I cannot offer a new solution and will support the etymology cautiously given in the OED online. Yet sometimes the way to the truth and chance byways are more exciting than the result, obtained at the end of the search. It will also be fair to mention the paper by the German linguist Hermann Flasdieck in the periodical Anglia (Volume 70,1951-1952, pp. 295-307), the best historical study of the word box in linguistic literature.
The earliest citation of box “to beat, bash, strike” in the OED online goes back to 1390, but we have to wait until 1519 until the next one. Even some time later, the word’s occurrences in print were rare. Apparently, box was not a word one chose to use in books. This fact confirms the origin (see it below), proposed tentatively by the OED’s first editor JamesA. H. Murray and now accepted with some caution by the revisers of the OED and other sources.
In the United States, boxing, a sport whose land of origin is England, became immensely popular. Those who have read Jack London’s short stories “The Mexican” and “A Piece ofSteak” will agree. German tourists must have picked up the word box in America, because they brought it home in the forms boxen and baxen. A great difference exists between the way a word like box sounds in most of England and in the United States. Foreigners living and traveling in America often mistake box, not, and their likes for bucks and nut. German boxen ~ baxen tell us that long ago, the word box sounded in America as it does today.
Pandora opened the box. Many evils broke loose, but boxing has nothing to do with Ancient Greece. “Pandora” by Frederick Stuart Church. Hawthorne Portfolio, 1884. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
One wonders whether box (the verb and the noun) has anything to do with its best-known homonym. The history of box, as in Christmas box, may not be entirely clear, but that box already occurred in Old English and is a borrowing from Latin. Nothing in the sport, as we know it, suggests its connection with any receptacle. Theater boxes and box offices return us to containers and throw no light on boxing either.
A theater box: again a wrong source for our sport. Photo by Bernard Gagnon. CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Along the way, we find the phrase to box a compass “to repeat the points of the compass in order and backwards.” Though also unconnected with boxing, the story is worth telling. Walter W. Skeat referred to the OED, but the OED had nothing to say about the etymology of this phrase. Nor did the 1914 edition of The Century Dictionary. The OED online refers us to the verb box (and that is what the original OED did). My surprise came when I consulted The Oxford Dictionary ofEnglish Etymology (1966). This work seldom deviates from its great model. Yet, surprisingly, it contains a special entry on box the compass: “Probably from Spanish bojar (boxar) ‘sail round’.” Next, we find two examples and the statement that other nautical terms from Spanish also exist in English. Such are allegedly buoyant (which may be from Spanish or Old French!) and capsize (this is Skeat’s suggestion; elsewhere, including the OED online, we find the familiar verdict “of uncertain origin”).
References to authorities in the original OED and in Skeat are rather regular but not generous. In the 1966 dictionary, they never appear. What then was the source of the new entry? Perhaps I can provide the answer (of course, known to the Oxford team but not to the rest of the world, eager for an explanation). In the periodical Notes and Queries XII/1, March 18, 1916, p. 226, H. J. B. Clemens published part of a letter, written in 1836 by Thomas Bee, a native of South Carolina, who was at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1783 to 1789. Here is the relevant part: “You know I had always a smattering of etymology, but never indulged so much in it as since I have become a great reader of Spanish […]. I was principally gratified with the origin of the phrase ‘to box the compass’, which has puzzled me from a boy […]. Boxar (or as it is more modernly written, bojar—with the same pronunciation) signifies circumire, to go round: boxar el mundo, to go round the world; boxar la isla to sail round the island. To box the compass is, therefore, to go round the several divisions from north to south, and from south to north.” I could find no information on H. J. B. Clemens and do not know why he had access to Thomas Bee’s private correspondence. His etymology of the English phrase looks promising.
The 1966 dictionary cites the same two Spanish phrases, which clinches my belief that this note was indeed the source of the entry. Finding the true origin of a difficult word is “a big deal” in the uneventful life of dictionary makers, and the name of an occasional pathfinder should not be forgotten. Obviously, the Spanish verb throws no light on the word box that interests us, but let me repeat my idea that in a convoluted romance, digressions are sometimes more exciting than the main story.
Back to boxing. The Century Dictionary says, “supposed to be of Scandinavian origin”; doubts the relevance of the Scandinavian sources, because baste “to cudgel” and the noun bash “blow” are already known as the legitimate reflexes of those sources; mentions Dutch beuk “a blow” and Middle High Germanbochen “to strike,” but concludes that the most probable origin should be sought for in box “to place in a box.” The conclusion is not persuasive. The origin of bash is as obscure as the origin of box, and in principle, nothing prevents one etymon (source) from producing two or more reflexes (“offspring”). Reference to box “receptacle” leaves us nowhere. However, German bochen, known to the speakers of Modern German in the form pochen, and Dutch beuk may provide a clue to box.
If we look for the many variants, older forms, and cognates of pochen ~ bochen, we’ll find puchen, puggen, pukken, boka, buka, and (!) Engl. poke (verb). In the present context, it matters little whether poke is borrowed or native. More important is the fact that we are, rather obviously, dealing with sound-imitative verbs (the reference is to the sound heard in striking), like English kick, jab, dab, cuff, bang, boom, bash, Russian bukh (a word reproducing a loud noise, with cognates elsewhere in Slavic), and puk “fart.”
A boxer dog. At last we have what we need. Image by Myriams-Fotos. Public domain via Pixabay.
Murray, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, already supposed that box is an onomatopoeia. In all probability, he was right, and one cannot but admire his intuition. “Origin unknown,” so lavishly added to such verbs in dictionaries, is an unhelpful label. The OED online has no citations of box between 1390 and 1519. We may be dealing with two independent coinages: the same verb was perhaps invented or borrowed twice, with about a century and a half between those events. Such words travel widely from language to language, and it is hard to decide whether we see loans or independent coinages.
Such then is a rather probable history of the sound-imitative verb box. Origin unknown? Not quite. Uncertain? Of course! What else could one expect?
Postscript
My thanks are due to the two readers who commented on the previous post on the evils of Spelling Bee.
