Homonyms, Etymologically Speaking: P

Many words have two meanings, sometimes more, which are often very different. Such words have identical spelling and pronunciation, they are known as homonyms. Here I continue an A to Z list of such words and look at how that word came to have two different meanings.

P is for palm, which is either a tree or a part of the hand. The body part is not recorded until around 1300, it came to English from Old French paume and Latin palma 'the flat of the hand'. Both are derived from Proto-Indo-European pele 'flat, to spread' and for obvious reasons.

The tree or the word for the tree, correctly known as the date palm, spread to Western Europe along with Christianity. It is thought to describe the leaves of the tree which have a spreading effect like the fingers on the hand.

The sense of 'palm' meaning a bribe is seen as early as 1620, but then the term was 'palm oil'.

Homonyms, Etymologically Speaking: O

Many words have two meanings, sometimes more, which are often very different. Such words have identical spelling and pronunciation, they are known as homonyms. Here I continue an A to Z list of such words and look at how that word came to have two different meanings.

O is for orange, and the pretty obvious choice for 'O' as it enables us to examine the age-old chicken and egg question as to which came first, the fruit or its colour. The answer is surprisingly easy, for we have to show the orange was known as such in the late 14th century (albeit as the tree more than its fruit) while the colour was known as red-yellow for some time after that. The fruit originated in India with Sanskrit naranga-s 'orange tree', sadly nothing earlier than that is known.

Whilst on the subject of such posers, we do not which came first the chicken or the egg. It was the egg, and by a staggering period of time. The chicken was domesticated by man about 10,000 years ago, having diverged from the junglefowl about 58,000 years ago. A long time, most certainly, but a blink of the eye in the life of the Earth and life on it, for eggs were certainly used by all manner of creatures before chickens - dinosaurs, fish, and just about every multi-cellular creature to evolve in the sea all began life as an egg (this applies to humans, too). Hence, eggs have been around for at least 500 million years.

The chicken and egg question has an answer, because the question is wrong. It should be, which came first the chicken or the chicken egg? The answer is the chicken, because until there's a chicken to lay the egg, it won't be a chicken egg.

Homonyms, Etymologically Speaking: N

Many words have two meanings, sometimes more, which are often very different. Such words have identical spelling and pronunciation, they are known as homonyms. Here I continue an A to Z list of such words and look at how that word came to have two different meanings.

N is for nail, the metal fixing used by carpenters and those things you file, clip, paint, or nibble on the ends of one's digits. Undoubtedly the earliest nails used in carpentry were not simply tapered but deliberately curved. There is a school of thought that these were designed on the nails of birds of prey (we would refer to them as talons). In which case these have identical origins in Proto-Indo-European nogh 'nail of the finger or toe'. This is given some weight by the Greek onyx meaning both 'claw' and 'fingernail' (similarly seen in Latin, Old Irish, Lithuanian, Old Welsh, and Old Church Slavonic).

Terms derived from 'nail' included 'hard as nails', first recorded in 1828; hit the nail on the head, first seen in 1520; on the nail, from 1590; and also the measurement 'a nail' which was on the end of a yardstick used by dealers in cloth and measured approximately 2.1/4 inches.

Homonyms, Etymologically Speaking: M

Many words have two meanings, sometimes more, which are often very different. Such words have identical spelling and pronunciation, they are known as homonyms. Here I continue an A to Z list of such words and look at how that word came to have two different meanings.

M is for match, the comparison or the little stick for producing fire, came to English from each of the two main Western European language groups - Germanic and Latin respectively. Taking the Germanic first, we find Old English maecca 'companion, mate, wife, husband'; Proto-Germanic gamakon 'fitting well'; and Proto-Indo-European mag 'to knead, fashion'.

The fire lighter came to English from Old French meiche 'wick of a candle'; Latin myxa and Greek myxa both meaning 'lamp wick', but the latter also used to refer to 'mucus' (yes, as in snot); and all based on the Proto-Indo-European meug 'slimy, slippery'.