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.