Simon Horobin - Bagels, Bumf, and Buses: A Day in the Life of the English Language

The Anglo-Saxons were evidently early risers, since they coined a variety of words to describe first light. They even had a word for the hour before dawnuhtanthat the rest of us would call the middle of the night. This was the hour when medieval monks celebrated the office of uht-song, now known by its Latin name Matins (still seen in the French for morning, matin). Old English also had a term for the sorrow and anxiety experienced at this time of the day, uhtceare, presumably coined by sleepy monks faced with the prospect of getting out of bed in a freezing cold dormitory (Latin dormitorium sleeping place) for uht-song. Another useful word for capturing that nebulous (Latin nebulosus cloudy) sense of foreboding that hangs over you first thing in the morning is matutolypea, a classical word literally meaning grief of the dawn.

Other Anglo-Saxon words for dawn are compoundsa common way of forming new words in Old English (and all Germanic languages). Day-rim, literally border of the day, refers to dawn as the beginning of a new day. Day-row, whose second element means ray, figures the dawn as the bringer of light; this image lies behind other terms such as rodor-lihtung illumination of the heavens and day-reddescribing the colour of the sky. The later Middle Ages added some nicely uplifting words, such as springing and uprising. The fifteenth century also saw the adoption into English of the name of Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn, as well as the word orient. Orient is used today to refer to the countries of the East; the word originates in Latin oriri to rise, and so referred to the East as the land of the rising sun. The occident, the equivalent term for the West, has its origins in the Latin occidere to go downland of the setting sun. The image of the rising sun as an opening eye lies behind the sixteenth-century terms peeping and peep of the day. A more dramatic image in which the sun breaks throughwhich survives in modern English daybreak and crack of dawnis found in breach of the day, sun-break, prick of the day, and creek (from a Dutch verb meaning burst through). By contrast with these poetic terms and the images they conjure up, the nineteenth-century dialect