By Anatoly Liberman
I usually try to discuss words whose origin is so uncertain that, when it comes to etymology, dictionaries refuse to commit themselves. But every now and then words occur whose history has been investigated most convincingly, and their history is worth recounting. Such is the word odd. Everything is odd about it, including the fact that its original form has not survived in English. Odd appeared as odde in the fourteenth century. It was a borrowing from Scandinavian, where oddr meant “spear point” and metonymically “spear.” But next to oddr Old Icelandic oddi “triangle; a ‘tongue’ of land” existed. From “triangle” the meaning “an odd number,” as opposed to “an even number,” developed. The compound oddamaðr (ð has the value of th in Modern Engl. the, this, that) meant “the third man, he who gives the casting vote” or simply “an odd man,” that is, the third, fifth, and so forth. It is from oddamaðr that English has “odd man (out).” Icelandic oddatal “odd number” has the same structure as oddamaðr; tal is related to Engl. tell “count,” as in tell the beads and others (compare also the noun teller). Icelandic vera í odda continued into English as to be at odds, and this is also why heroes fight against overwhelming odds. Odd in twenty odd years, three hundred odd (any number between 300 and 400) has the same source. Even oddball, coined apparently in America close to the middle of the twentieth century, harkens back to the Old Scandinavian word. Such are the odds and ends of etymology. Some dictionaries devote separate entries to the adjective odd and the plural noun odds, but there is no need to do so. The singular — the odd — occurs in whist and golf; since the meaning of the odd is “handicap,” it resembles the plural in the common phrase odds-on. Odd is an ideal playing ground for puns. Is odd couple “an extra pair” or “two people who don’t match”? An odd trick in whist is not a peculiar trick but the seventh, the first the winners count toward the score (incidentally, the terminology of games is not the same in Great Britain and the United States).
Oddi was frequent in Scandinavian local names, and it was on a farm called Oddi that Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) grew up. At the bottom of this post, a modern picture of Oddi is reproduced. This photo, along with geysers, volcanoes, mountains (in which only ghosts live), and Þingvellir (the place of the most ancient European parliament), is one of the best-known sights used in advertising trips to Iceland (þ = th in Engl. thin). Snorri was a great historian, poet, and politician. He wrote a book known today as The Prose Edda, or The Younger Edda, a manual of Old Scandinavian poetics and myths, as they were remembered in the thirteenth century. He also wrote a history of the kings of Norway (Heimskringla; the book still reads like a thriller — it exists in two excellent English translations) and possibly one the best sagas (The Saga of Egill; in English translations, usually one l is retained: Egil). He was killed by his enemies, and never has a more tragic event happened in the history of Icelandic literature. The origin of the name Edda is a mystery (though the conjectures by etymologists are many), and attempts have been made to connect Edda and Oddi, but the connection is, almost certainly, due to chance and is not more convincing than the one between Boston and best. It is for the sake of Snorri, if for nothing else, that the etymology of odd deserves our attention.
In Icelandic oddr, dd goes b