Hoad - The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology

Hoad, T. F

Oxford University Press

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CONCISE DICTIONARY OF

'all that anyone other than a specialist needs

to know about words'

Daily Telegraph

Digitized by the Internet Archivein 2017 with funding fromKahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/conciseoxforddicOOtfho

OXFORD PAPERBACK REFERENCE

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of

T. F. Hoad is Fellow and Tutor in English Language andMedieval Literature at St Peters College, Oxford, andLecturer in English at the University of Oxford. The workof compiling this dictionary was initially undertaken bythe late G. W. S. Friedrichsen and the book has the benefitof his many years experience of etymological work forthe Oxford dictionaries.

The most authoritative and up-to-date referencebooks for both students and the general reader.

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F. C. H.

AND

D. M. H.

This dictionary is based upon the Oxford Dictionary of EnglishEtymology (1966), compiled by C. T. Onions with the assistance ofG. W. S. Friedrichsen and R. W. Burchfield. It was the late DrFriedrichsen who first produced a draft for a concise version of thatdictionary, and the present editor took over the work in 1977. Ingeneral, the book remains faithful to Dr Friedrichsens plan, althougha good many changes of detail and of a broader kind have been made,for which the present editor is alone accountable.

The intention is that each entry should give a concise statementof the route by which its headword entered the English language,together with, where appropriate, a brief account of its developmentin English.

In each case, the headword is followed by a figure in Romannumerals indicating the century in which the word is first recorded inEnglish, or if definitions are provided these are followed by figures inRoman numerals indicating the centuries in which the various sensesare first evidenced. In the case of words or senses recorded from theOld English period (c.7OO-c.llO0), however, these are labelled simplyOE. (or at most late OE.), since the nature of the surviving materialsusually makes any closer dating impracticable.

Definitions have not been provided for words whose senses haveundergone no major change in English, and whose meanings are likelyto be readily ascertainable by most readers. The same practice hasbeen adopted in the case of many technical and scientific words, whosesenses may be quickly discovered by recourse to a small English dictionary. No attempt has been made to record all the modern senses ofwords for which definitions are provided, since these are frequentlyof secondary importance in tracing the etymology and history of thewords in question.

A good many early spellings of words have been included, usuallyafter the relevant Roman numeral denoting the century of firstoccurrence. Such spellings have in particular been includedwhere they help to elucidate the origin and development of particularwords.

This dictionary distinguishes three principal kinds of process in theevolution of words:

(1) The normal development of a word within a given language,according to the regular processes of change in that language. Thus,English goose is explained as the normal development of the word*3ans- in the pre-literary Germanic language from which English is

descended, and Gmc. *3ans- is in turn the normal development of anearlier Indo-European *ghans-.

(2) The adoption of a word from one language into some other language. Thus, Eng. brave is explained as an adoption (borrowing) ofFrench brave, which in turn is an adoption of Italian bravo.

(3) The formation of a word on some existing word or element bymeans of a derivational device, or by compounding. Thus, Eng. alleviate is explained as having been formed on the past participial stem(allevidt-) of the late Latin verb allevidre, by means of the derivationalsuffix -ate, while allevidre is in turn formed on the Latin adjectivelevis by means of the derivational prefix al-. The Eng. compoundnightmare was formed by the combining of night and Middle Englishmare incubus.

The symbols used, for brevity, to denote these three processes arelisted below. It is, of course, not always possible to reduce the accountof the origins and development of words to a simple formula, andwhere necessary further explanation has been given.