Open Writing

Homonyms: Words which have several meanings, 8

Homophones are words that look different but sound the same — they are spelt differently but pronounced in the same way as each other. Examples include bare/bear and tied/tide. Pronunciation of words might vary in different cultures. For instance, file and phial are homophones in some regions where English is spoken but perhaps not in other areas.

Homonyms are words that are pronounced or spelt the same but have different meanings. The word was coined in about 1697, and is based on Greek words homos, meaning same, and onyma meaning name. Here are some examples: Bear can mean "carry" and also denote a furry animal. Tide is used for the movement of the water of the sea, and it is also in words that denote a season such as Yuletide. File can mean a metal tool used by carpenters and also a cardboard folder.

In this series of articles, I have dealt with several sets of homonyms and explored their history. When you know where the words came from, how they developed, and how they were used in past centuries, you can understand more fully why apparently identical words can have different meanings.

Because I enjoy this sort of research and writing, and find it rewarding, I decided to apply it to another group of homonyms, namely, words with unusual meanings or meanings that we no longer use. For example, "bravo" is not merely a cry of approval but also a hired assassin. Here is an example, in a novel by Wilkie Collins:

...the Baron is a man of refined tastes; he dislikes needless cruelty. The active policy remains— say, assassination by the knife of a hired bravo? The Baron objects to trusting an accomplice...

To select words for investigation, I browsed through a selection from Dr Johnson's remarkable 1755 dictionary and then traced their history in Oxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries.

For us, "abode" is a slightly old fashioned noun meaning the house where one lives. In past times, it was also a verb, with a different meaning. Shakespeare used this verb just once in all his plays (Henry VI Part 3):

The owl shriek'd at thy birth — an evil sign;
The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time;
Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down

You can see what it means — think of the word "forebode". Dr Johnson defined the verb to abode as to foretoken or foreshadow; to be prognostic, to be ominous. This comes from a 13th century meaning implying waiting while there is a delay. "I will bide my time" means I will wait a while longer. An abode as a home is related to the words bide and abide, coming from 12th century origins. It is the place where we bide our time, where wait becomes stay.

We might sometimes (impolitely) describe someone's appearance as beetle-browed. This has nothing to do with the beetles that live in the garden. They get their title from the Old English word bietl or bietel. Another word in Old English was bitula/bitela. It denoted a mallet or hammer. Thus Dr Johnson's second definition of beetle is "a heavy mallet, or wooden hammer, with which wedges are driven" and beetlebrowed means "having prominent brows", i.e., lumpy like a hammer.

In the 1700s, "bargain" has a very unusual meaning which we no longer use. It is Dr Johnson's fourth definition: an unexpected reply, tending to obscenity. The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue gives an example in the form of a bawdy riposte spoken by a maid of honour to a gentleman whom she had enticed to ask what had followed her into the room. She declared, "My arse". Obviously not the sort of bargain you would hope to find in your local shops.

Gossip as a noun and a verb is usually something to do with worthless talk, rumour, or tittle-tattle. However, it had is origin over 1,000 years ago in Old English godsibb, meaning a sponsor. The clue to the development of its usage to denote different kinds of relationships is in the second part of the word, which you can see is related to "sibling". In the 1300s, gossip came to mean a companion or chum. Dr Johnson's second definition is "a tippling companion" but his first is rather surprising — gossip means "one who answers for a child in baptism". This is a direct descendant of the idea of sponsorship, embracing "God" and a familial relationship.

Here's another surprise: a macaroon is "a coarse, rude, low fellow; whence macaronick poetry, in which the language is purposely corrupted". This usage arose from a group of young men in the mid-1700s, known as the Maccaroni Club because of their affected love of continental food and fashion. It implied a chap was a fop, a dandy, a fool. Nowadays, a fondness for Italian pasta denotes no such thing. Meaning a confection of almost paste, sugar and egg, the word macaroon came into English in about 1611. For a while, macaroni could mean the same thing.

This compilation © Copyright Brian Barratt 2010

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Sources and references:

These are the main reference books used to compile this series of articles on homonyms. Where material has been quoted in brief, it is for non-commercial fair review and educational purposes in terms of the Copyright Act.

— Oxford English Dictionary, Version 2.0, CD, Oxford University Press, 1999.

— Library of the Future: 5,000 Works, 4th ed., CD, World Library, Irvine CA, 1998.

— The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Senate Editions, London 1994.

Ayto, J., Dictionary of Word Origins, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 1990.

Barnhart, R.K. (ed.), Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, H.H.Wilson Company, USA, and Chambers, Edinburgh, 1988.

Barron W.R.J. & Weinberg, S.C., (trans.) Layamon's Brüt, Longman Group, Harlow, 1995.

Bradley, H., A Middle-English Dictionary, (1891), Oxford University Press, London, 1963.

Brohaugh, W., English through the Ages, Writer's Digest Books, Cincinnati, 1998.

Crystal, D & B, Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary and Language Companion, Penguin Books, London, 2002.

Hall, J.R.Clark, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th ed., University of Toronto Press/Cambridge University Press, Toronto, 1960.

Ingram, Rev. J., The Saxon Chronicle AD1 to AD 1154, (1823), Studio Editions, London, 1993

McAdam, E.L, & Milne, G., Johnson's Dictionary: A Modern Selection. Victor Gollancz 1963 & Macmillan, London, 1982

Room, A. (rev.) Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, 15th ed., Cassell, London, 1996.

Swanton, M (trans,, rev.) Beowulf, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997.

Watkins, C. (ed.), The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.

— Dictionaries of English with Danish, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Latin.

— Web sites for a searchable copy of The Saxon Chronicle and one obsolete word in Shakespeare's pl