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The Oxford English Dictionary is the work of people: many thousands of them. In my work on the history of the Dictionary I have found the stories of many of those people endlessly fascinating. Very often an individual will enter the story who cries out to be made the subject of a biography in his or her own right; others, while not quite fascinating enough for that, are still sufficiently interesting that they could be a dangerous distraction to me when I was trying to concentrate on the main task of telling the story of the project itself.

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I am not sure that any lexicographer or historian of linguistics thought of writing an essay on James Murray as a speaker and journalist, though such an essay would allow the author to explore the workings of Murray’s mind and the development of his style. (Let me remind our readers that Murray, 1837-1915, died a hundred years ago.)

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In the United States everything is planned very long in advance, while in Europe one can sometimes read about a conference that will be held a mere three months later. By that time all the travel money available to an American academic will have been spent a millennium ago. In the United States, we have visions rather than short-range plans.

The post Monthly etymology gleaning for May 2015 appeared first on OUPblog.

Murray’s centennial

Although I am still in 2014, as the title of this post indicates, in the early January one succumbs to the desire to say something memorable that will set the tone to the rest of the year. So I would like to remind everybody that in 1915 James Murray, the first and greatest editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) or New English Dictionary (NED), died. Here is the conclusion of an obituary published in The Nation (vol. 101, p. 134):

“He was an organizer of scholarship, calling for recruits, as Sir Walter Raleigh called for them in the days of his dreams of a flourishing Virginia, and leading them into half-explored or virgin territory, there to spy out the land as a preliminary to setting down what they found, with such accuracy and fulness [sic] that no one else should need to go over the ground again, except to supply a detail here and there or to cross an occasional t or dot an occasional i.”

To avoid sounding too solemn, I’ll quote another passage, also from The Nation, this time printed in 1933. Naturally, I am responsible for neither the anonymous author’s statistics nor his attitude toward men, stockings, and the secret dealings inside the OED:

“When the dictionary was completed in 1928, the compilers were appalled to discover that while they had been at work, one new word had broken into the language for every ten old ones. So they set about a supplement, which doubtless will be followed by a supplement to the supplement, and so on. The supplement-makers were asked to include forty-three new words to describe various shades of women’s stockings. They were conservative gentlemen who in the days when they were most concerned with women’s stockings were able to discern only two colors, white and black, and they refused to introduce a new category.”

Spelling

Valerie Yule suggested that we cut surplus letters, except for 38 very common irregular words. According to her plan, we will end up with qickly, reserch, sho, lernd, pepl, gide, for quickly, research, show, learned, people, guide, and so on. I am ready to support any version of the reform that has a chance of being accepted. For qickly I would prefer kwikli, but the time for arguing about details will come when we have the public on our side. Many researchers (reserchers) have offered lists of words that can or should be respelled (consult Masha Bell’s website, among others). My greatest fear is that the Society for Simplified Spelling will keep producing excellent ideas instead of calling the wide world to arms.

Emily F. Grazier wrote that, although she understands my aversion to the digraph ph, she wonders “what will happen to etymology… if such reforms are applied”; she is worried about “the potential historical loss.” This fear is familiar. It may sound like a poor joke, but, being a professional etymologist, I don’t want modern spelling to become an etymological old curiosity shop. Here are the main points.

1. In dealing with etymology, one never knows where to stop. The British spelling of honour, colour, etc. shows its loyalty to French, but all such words are ultimately from Latin, and there the ending was -or, not -our.
2. What looks like etymology is often a trace of Middle English pronunciation. Take wright in playwright. Initial w has been silent for centuries, and knowing that the letter w once designated a real sound does not tell modern speakers too much about the word’s origin, for no one without special training will guess that wright is allied to work. The digraph -gh- stood for the consonant of the type we hear in Scots loch. This is another piece of information I would not call too valuable.
3. However conservative spelling may be, it is never conservative enough to substitute for a course in historical linguistics. Think of the origin and development of enough, with its e- going back to a lost prefix, gh (as in wright!) that here became f, and the vowel whose origin one will never guess without looking it up in a book on the history of English.
4. In many cases, archaic spelling is the result of false etymologizing or analogy. For instance, whore, unlike whose, never had w-.
5. Finally, even in Italian the digraph ph has been abolished, and Italian is, arguably, closer to Latin than Middle English. See more on ph in my post “The Oddest English Spellings: Part 21” (September 21, 2012).

Pronunciation

Should ration rhyme with passion or with nation? Our correspondent David Markle looked up this word in various dictionaries and traced its history in detail. There is nothing for me to add. But he also mentioned privacy and several other words with the letter i. It is no wonder that differences in their pronunciation exist. As a general rule, a word consisting of three syllables should have a short vowel in the first one (holiday versus holy and the like). But the influence of private pulled the word in the opposite direction.

Another factor is spelling pronunciation. It has given us often pronounced as of-ten and forehead pronounced as fore-head. Hardly anyone around me rhymes often with soften and forehead with horrid. My variants (offen and forrid) sound as wrong or deliberately snobbish (naturally, I can’t say elitist: there cannot be a worse sin). On the other hand, to my ear mythology, when pronounced by a British professor as my-thology, is a bad joke, though I have resigned myself to the fact that in England they value privvacy and know in which di-rection to go. But the pronunciation divissive for divisive was new to me. The influence of division or of missive, submissive, dismissive, permissive? To be on the safe side, I turned to the Internet and looked up words rhyming with missive (I also consulted three rhyming dictionaries) and, to my consternation, found derisive. It matters little who produced the list on the Internet, for it shows that the pronunciations divissive and derissive are more frequent than most of us think. As regards Appalachian, with the syllable in bold pronounced as latch, there is no problem: it is a universally recognized variant used by the locals.

A few etymologies

Several questions about word origins require more space than is left for today’s post. I will answer them on the last Wednesday of January. Today only the easiest ones will be taken care of.

Kw- ~ tw (tv-)

To David Campbell who wrote: “The article on Qualm/Tvalm [not too long ago, there was a post on qualm] made me think of a similar example: quer and tver, as in German Querflöte ‘transverse flute’ and Swedish tverflöjt.” Yes, indeed, this is a similar case. The old word had thw-, as in Engl. thwart, from Scandinavian. Its Old High German cognate was dwerch or twerch. The phonetic change, which originated in some dialects, changed tw to zw. Hence German Zwerg versus Engl. dwarf and German Quark, a delicious thing; the word goes back to the Slavic form that begins with tv-. In Swedish, thw- became tv.

Lefties are the best lovers

To Keith Jacobs. He wrote: “We would like to understand the reason gauche means ‘awkward’. Is it pejorative against the left-handed or some other subtlety?” I saw the words used in the title of my response engraved on the cup a teenager gave her left-handed father. That admirable person was (and still is) a man of highly progressive views, an ideal husband, and a loving parent. But outside such special situations the left hand has traditionally been connected with awkwardness. Offenses are rarely subtle, so gauche has the connotations our correspondent suspects.

The post Monthly gleanings for December 2014, Part 2 appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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As always, I want to thank those who have commented on the posts and written me letters bypassing the “official channels” (though nothing can be more in- or unofficial than this blog; I distinguish between inofficial and unofficial, to the disapproval of the spellchecker and some editors). I only wish there were more comments and letters. With regard to my “bimonthly” gleanings, I did think of calling them bimestrial but decided that even with my propensity for hard words I could not afford such a monster. Trimestrial and quarterly are another matter. By the way, I would not call fortnightly a quaint Briticism. The noun fortnight is indeed unknown in the United States, but anyone who reads books by British authors will recognize it. It is sennight “seven nights; a week,” as opposed to “fourteen nights; two weeks,” that is truly dead, except to Walter Scott’s few remaining admirers.

The comments on livid were quite helpful, so that perhaps livid with rage does mean “white.” I was also delighted to see Stephen Goranson’s antedating of hully gully. Unfortunately, I do not know this word’s etymology and have little chance of ever discovering it, but I will risk repeating my tentative idea. Wherever the name of this game was coined, it seems to have been “Anglicized,” and in English reduplicating compounds of the Humpty Dumpty, humdrum, and helter-skelter type, those in which the first element begins with an h, the determining part is usually the second, while the first is added for the sake of rhyme. If this rule works for hully gully, the clue to the word’s origin is hidden in gully, with a possible reference to a dupe, a gull, a gullible person; hully is, figuratively speaking, an empty nut. A mere guess, to repeat once again Walter Skeat’s favorite phrase.

The future of spelling reform and realpolitik

Some time ago I promised to return to this theme, and now that the year (one more year!) is coming to an end, I would like to make good on my promise. There would have been no need to keep beating this moribund horse but for a rejoinder by Mr. Steve Bett to my modest proposal for simplifying English spelling. I am afraid that the reformers of our generation won’t be more successful than those who wrote pleading letters to journals in the thirties of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the Congress being planned by the Society will succeed in making powerful elites on both sides of the Atlantic interested in the sorry plight of English spellers. I wish it luck, and in the meantime will touch briefly on the discussion within the Society.

In the past, minimal reformers, Mr. Bett asserts, usually failed to implement the first step. The first step is not an issue as long as we agree that there should be one. Any improvement will be beneficial, for example, doing away with some useless double letters (till ~ until); regularizing doublets like speak ~ speech; abolishing c in scion, scene, scepter ~ scepter, and, less obviously, scent; substituting sk for sc in scathe, scavenger, and the like (by the way, in the United States, skeptic is the norm); accepting (akcepting?) the verbal suffix -ize for -ise and of -or for -our throughout — I can go on and on, but the question is not where to begin but whether we want a gradual or a one-fell-swoop reform. Although I am ready to begin anywhere, I am an advocate of painless medicine and don’t believe in the success of hav, liv, and giv, however silly the present norm may be (those words are too frequent to be tampered with), while til and unskathed will probably meet with little resistance.

I am familiar with several excellent proposals of what may be called phonetic spelling. No one, Mr. Bett assures me, advocates phonetic spelling. “What about phonemic spelling?” he asks. This is mere quibbling. Some dialectologists, especially in Norway, used an extremely elaborate transcription for rendering the pronunciation of their subjects. To read it is a torture. Of course, no one advocates such a system. Speakers deal with phonemes rather than “sounds.” But Mr. Bett writes bás Róman alfàbet shud rèmán ùnchánjd for “base Roman alphabet should remain unchanged.” I am all for alfabet (ph is a nuisance) and with some reservations for shud, but the rest is, in my opinion, untenable. It matters little whether this system is clever, convenient, or easy to remember. If we offer it to the public, we’ll be laughed out of court.

Mr. Bett indicates that publishers are reluctant to introduce changes and that lexicographers are not interested in becoming the standard bearers of the reform. He is right. That is why it is necessary to find a body (The Board of Education? Parliament? Congress?) that has the authority to impose changes. I have made this point many times and hope that the projected Congress will not come away empty-handed. We will fail without influential sponsors, but first of all, the Society needs an agenda, agree to the basic principles of a program, and for at least some time refrain from infighting.

The indefinite pronoun one once again

I was asked whether I am uncomfortable with phrases like to keep oneself to oneself. No, I am not, and I don’t object to the sentence one should mind one’s own business. A colleague of mine has observed that the French and the Germans, with their on and man are better off than those who grapple with one in English. No doubt about it. All this is especially irritating because the indefinite pronoun one seems to owe its existence to French on. However, on and man, can function only as the subject of the sentence. Nothing in the world is perfect.

Our dance around pronouns sometimes assumes grotesque dimensions. In an email, a student informed me that her cousin is sick and she has to take care of them. She does not know, she added, when they will be well enough, to allow her to attend classes. Not that I am inordinately curious, but it is funny that I was protected from knowing whether “they” are a man or a woman. In my archive, I have only one similar example (I quoted it long ago): “If John calls, tell them I’ll soon be back.” Being brainwashed may have unexpected consequences.

Earl and the Herulians

Our faithful correspondent Mr. John Larsson wrote me a letter about the word earl. I have a good deal to say about it. But if he has access to the excellent but now defunct periodical General Linguistics, he will find all he needs in the article on the Herulians and earls by Marvin Taylor in Volume 30 for 1992 (the article begins on p. 109).

The OED: Behind the scenes

Many people realize what a gigantic effort it took to produce the Oxford English Dictionary, but only insiders are aware of how hard it is to do what seems trivial to a non-specialist. Next year we’ll mark the centennial of James A. H. Murray’s death, and I hope that this anniversary will not be ignored the way Skeat’s centennial was in 2012. Today I will cite one example of the OED’s labors in the early stages of work on it. In 1866, Cornelius Payne, Jun. was reading John Vanbrugh’s plays for the projected dictionary, and in Notes and Queries, Series 3, No. X for July 7 he asked the readers to explain several passages he did not understand. Two of them follow. 1) Clarissa: “I wish he would quarrel with me to-day a little, to pass away the time.” Flippanta: “Why, if you please to drop yourself in his way, six to four but he scolds one Rubbers with you.” 2) Sir Francis:…here, John Moody, get us a tankard of good hearty stuff presently. J. Moody: Sir, here’s Norfolk-nog to be had at next door.” Rubber(s) is a well-known card term, and it also means “quarrel.” See rubber, the end of the entry. Norfolk-nog did not make its way into the dictionary because no idiomatic sense is attached to it: the phrase means “nog made and served in Norfolk” (however, the OED did not neglect Norfolk). Such was and still is the price of every step. Read and wonder. And if you have a taste for Restoration drama, read Vanbrugh’s plays: moderately enjoyable but not always fit for the most innocent children (like those surrounding us today).

The post Monthly etymology gleanings for November 2014 appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Dictionaries never simply spring into being, but represent the work and research of many. Only a select few of the people who have helped create the Oxford English Dictionary, however, can lay claim to the coveted title ‘Editor’. In the first of an occasional series for the OxfordWords blog on the Editors of the OED, Peter Gilliver introduces the most celebrated, Sir James A. H. Murray.

By Peter Gilliver

If ever a lexicographer merited the adjective iconic, it must surely be James Augustus Henry Murray, the first Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; although what he would have thought about the word being applied to him—in a sense which only came into being long after his death—can only be guessed at, though it seems likely that he would disapprove, given his strongly expressed dislike of the public interest shown in him as a person, rather than in his work. The photograph of him in his Scriptorium in Oxford, wearing his John Knox cap and holding a book and a Dictionary quotation slip, is almost certainly the best-known image of any lexicographer. But there is a lot more to this prodigious man.

In fact prodigious is another good word for him, for several reasons. He was certainly something of a prodigy as a child, despite his humble background. Born on 7 February 1837 in the Scottish village of Denholm, near Hawick, the son of a tailor, he reputedly knew his alphabet by the time he was eighteen months old, and was soon showing a precocious interest in other languages, including—at the age of 7—Chinese, in the form of a page of the Bible which he laboriously copied out until he could work out the symbols for such words as God and light. Thanks to his voracious appetite for reading, and what he called ‘a sort of mania for learning languages’, he was already a remarkably well-educated boy by the time his formal schooling ended, at the age of 14, with a knowledge of French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and a range of other interests, including botany, geology, and archaeology. After a few years teaching in local schools—he was evidently a born teacher, and was made a headmaster at the age of 21—he moved to London, and took work in a bank. (It was only in 1855, incidentally, that he acquired the full name by which he’s become known: he had been christened plain James Murray, but he adopted two extra initials to stop his correspondence getting mixed up with that of the several other men living in Hawick who shared the name.) He soon began to attend meetings of the London Philological Society, and threw himself into the study of dialect and pronunciation—an interest he had already developed while still in Scotland—and also of the history of English. In 1870 an opening at Mill Hill School, just outside London, enabled him to return to teaching. He began studying for an external London BA degree, which he finished in 1873, the same year as his first big scholarly publication, a study of Scottish dialects which was widely recognized as a pioneering work in its field. Only a year later his linguistic research had earned him his first honorary degree, a doctorate from Edinburgh University: quite an achievement for a self-taught man of 37.

Dr. Murray, Editor

By this time the Philological Society had been trying to collect the materials for a new, and unprecedentedly comprehensive, dictionary of English for over a decade, but the project had gradually lost momentum following the early death of its first Editor, Herbert Coleridge. In 1876 Murray was approached by the London publishers Macmillans about the possibility of editing a dictionary based on the materials collected; the negotiations ultimately came to nothing, but the work which Murray did on this abandoned project was so impressive that when new negotiations were opened with Oxford University Press, and the search for an editor began again, it soon became clear that Murray was the only possible man for the job. After further negotiations, in March 1879 contracts were finally signed, for the compilation of a dictionary that was expected to run to 6,400 pages, in four volumes, and take 10 years to complete—and which Murray planned to edit while continuing to teach at Mill Hill School!

The Dictionary progresses. . .

As we now know, the project would end up taking nearly five times as long as originally planned, and the resulting dictionary ran to over 15,000 pages. Murray soon had to give up his schoolteaching, and moved to Oxford in 1885; even then progress was too slow, and eventually three other Editors were appointed, each with responsibility for different parts of the alphabet. Although for more than three-quarters of the time he worked on the OED there were other Editors working alongside him—he eventually died in 1915—and of course from the beginning he had a staff of assistants helping him, it is without question that he was the Editor of the Dictionary. (He soon had no need of those extra initials: a letter addressed simply to ‘Dr. Murray, Oxford’ would reach him without any difficulty, and he even had notepaper printed giving this as his address.) It was Murray who, in 1879, launched the great ‘Appeal to the English-speaking and English-reading public’ which brought most of the millions of quotation slips from which the Dictionary was mainly constructed—slips sent in from all parts of the English-speaking world, recording English as it was and had been used at all times and in all places. And it was during the early years of the project that all the details of its policy and style had to be settled, and that was Murray’s responsibility; the three later Editors matched their work to his as closely as they could. He was also responsible for more of the 15,000-plus pages of the Dictionary’s first edition than anyone else: the whole of the letters A–D, H–K, O, P, and all but the very end of T, amounting to approximately half of the total.

A dedicated man

What qualities enabled him to achieve this remarkable feat? It hardly needs to be said that he brought an extraordinary combination of linguistic abilities to the task: not just a knowledge of many languages, but the kind of sensitivity to fine nuances in English which all lexicographers need, in an exceptionally highly-developed form. He was also knowledgeable in a wide range of other fields. But one of his most striking qualities was his capacity for hard work, which once again deserves to be called prodigious. Throughout his time working on the Dictionary it was by no means unusual for him to put in 80 or 90 hours a week; he was often working in the Scriptorium by 6 a.m., and often did not leave until 11 p.m. Such a punishing regime would have destroyed the health of a weaker man, but Murray continued to work at this intensity into his seventies.

Somehow he managed to combine his work with a vigorous family life; another image of him which deserves to be just as well known as the studious portraits in the Scriptorium is the photograph showing him and his wife surrounded by their eleven children, or the one of him astride a huge ‘sand-monster’ constructed on the beach during one of the family’s holidays in North Wales. He also found time to be an active member of his local community: he was a staunch Congregationalist, regularly preaching at Oxford’s George Street chapel, and an active member of many local societies, and frequently gave lectures about the Dictionary. It is just as well that his conviction of the value of hard work was combined with an iron constitution.

But there is one image which vividly captures another, crucial aspect of this remarkable man, an aspect which arguably underpins his whole approach to life and work. Tellingly, it is not an image of the man himself, but of one of the slips on which the Dictionary was written. The winter of 1896 saw one of Murray’s numerous marathon efforts to complete a section of the Dictionary, in this case the end of the letter D. Very late in the evening of 24 November he was at last able to put the finishing touches to the entry for the word dziggetai (a mule-like mammal found in Mongolia, an animal which Murray would never have seen, and an apt illustration of the Dictionary’s worldwide scope). At 11 o’clock, on the last slip for this word, he wrote: ‘Here endeth Τῷ Θεῷ μόνῳ δόξα.’ The Greek words mean ‘To God alone be the glory’, a phrase which is to be found several times (in various languages) in his writings. For Murray his work on the OED was a God-given vocation. He certainly came to believe that the whole course of his life appeared, in retrospect, to have been designed to prepare him for the work of editing the Dictionary; and perhaps it was only his strong sense of vocation which sustained him through the long years of effort.

A version of this article originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog. 

Peter Gilliver is an Associate Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and is also writing a history of the OED.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words — past and present — from across the English-speaking world. Most UK public libraries offer free access to OED Online from your home computer using just your library card number.

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By Beverley Hunt

With just over a week to go until Christmas, many of us are no doubt looking forward to the holidays and a few days off work. For those working on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, however, writing the history of the language sometimes took precedence over a Christmas break.

Christmas leave in the UK today centres around a number of bank holidays, so called because they are days when, traditionally, banks closed for business. Before 1834, the Bank of England recognized about 33 religious festivals but this was reduced to just four in 1834 – Good Friday, 1 May, 1 November, and Christmas Day. It was the Bank Holidays Act of 1871 that saw bank holidays officially introduced for the first time. These designated four holidays in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland — Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August, and Boxing Day. Good Friday and Christmas Day were seen as traditional days of rest so did not need to be included in the Act. Scotland was granted five days of holiday — New Year’s Day, Good Friday, the first Monday in May, the first Monday in August, and Christmas Day.

So when James Murray took over as editor of the OED in 1879, Christmas Day was an accepted holiday across the whole of the UK, Boxing Day a bank holiday everywhere except Scotland, and New Year’s Day a bank holiday only in Scotland. Yet this didn’t stop editors and contributors toiling away on dictionary work on all three of those dates.

At Christmas play and make good cheer

Here is the first page of a lengthy letter to James Murray from fellow philologist Walter Skeat, written on Christmas Day, 1905. Skeat does at least start his letter with some seasonal greetings and sign off “in haste”, but talks at length about the word pillion in between! There are at least two other letters in the OED archives written on Christmas Day – a letter from W. Boyd-Dawkins in 1883 about the word aphanozygous (apparently the cheekbones being invisible when the skull is viewed from above, who knew?), and another from R.C.A. Prior about croquet in 1892.

Boxing clever

Written on Boxing Day, 1891, this letter to James Murray is from Richard Oliver Heslop, author of Northumberland Words. After an exchange of festive pleasantries, Oliver Heslop writes about the word corb as a possible misuse for the basket known as a corf, clearly a pressing issue whilst eating turkey leftovers! Many other Boxing Day letters reside in the OED archives, amongst them a 1932 letter to OUP’s Kenneth Sisam from editor William Craigie concerning potential honours in the New Year Honours list following completion of the supplement to the OED.

Out with the old, in with the new

Speaking of New Year, here is a “useless” letter to James Murray from OUP’s Printer Horace Hart, written on New Year’s Day, 1886. Although not an official holiday in Oxford at that time, this letter provides a nice opportunity for discussing the etymology of the term Boxing Day. The first weekday after Christmas Day became known as Boxing Day as it was the day when postmen, errand-boys, and servants of various kinds expected to receive a Christmas box as a monetary reward for their services during the previous year. This letter talks about baksheesh, a word used in parts of Asia for a gratuity or tip.

Holidays are coming

In case you’re wondering, New Year’s Day was granted as an additional bank holiday in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1974, as was Boxing Day in Scotland (and 2 January from 1973). So the whole of the UK now gets all three as official days of leave in which to enjoy the festive season.

This article originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Beverley Hunt is Archivist for the Oxford English Dictionary but will not be archiving on Christmas Day, Boxing Day, or New Year’s Day.

If you’re feeling inspired by the words featured in today’s blog post, why not take some time to explore OED Online? Most UK public libraries offer free access to OED Online from your home computer using just your library card number. If you are in the US, why not give the gift of language to a loved-one this holiday season? We’re offering a 20% discount on all new gift subscriptions to the OED to all customers residing in the Americas.

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By Anatoly Liberman

Booze is an enigmatic word, but not the way ale, beer and mead are.  Those emerged centuries ago, and it does not come as a surprise that we have doubts about their ultimate origin.  The noun booze is different: it does not seem to predate the beginning or the 18^th century, with the verb booze “to tipple, guzzle” making its way into a written text as early as 1300 (which means that it turned up in everyday speech some time earlier).  The riddles connected with booze are two.

First, why did the noun appear so much later than the verb?  A parallel case will elucidate the problem. The verb meet is ancient, while the noun meet is recent, and we can immediately see the reason for the delay: sports journalists needed a word for a “meeting” of athletes and teams and coined a meet, whose popularity infuriated some lovers of English, but, once the purists died out, the word became commonplace (this is how language changes: if a novelty succeeds in surviving its critics, it stays and makes the impression of having been around forever).  But the noun booze is not a technical term and should not have waited four hundred years before it joined the vocabulary.  Second, the verb booze is a doublet of bouse (it rhymes with carouse, which is fair).  Strangely, bouse has all but disappeared, and booze (sorry for a miserable pun) is on everybody’s lips.  However, it is not so much the death of bouse that should bother us as the difference in vowels.   The vowel we have in cow or round was once “long u” (as in today’s coo).  Therefore, bouse has the pronunciation one expects, whereas booze looks Middle English.  In the northern dialects of English “long u” did not become a diphthong, and this is probably why uncouth still rhymes with youth instead of south.  Is booze a northern doublet of bouse?  One can sense Murray’s frustration with this hypothesis.  He wrote: “Perhaps really a dialectal form” (and cited a similar Scots word).  It is the most uncharacteristic insertion of really that gives away Murray’s dismay.  His style, while composing entries, was business-like and crisp; contrary to most people around us, he preferred not to strew his explanations with really, actually, definitely, certainly, and other fluffy adverbs: he was a scholar, not a preacher.

Whatever the causes of the modern pronunciation of booze, one etymology will cover both it and bouse.  So what is the origin of bouse?  This word is surrounded by numerous nouns and verbs, some of which must be and others may be related to it.  First of all, its Dutch and German synonyms buizen and bausen spring to mind.  Both are rare to the extent of not being known to most native speakers, but their use in the past has been recorded beyond any doubt.  Most other words refer to swelling, violent or erratic movement, and noise: for instance, Dutch buisen “strike, knock” and, on the other hand, beuzelen “dawdle, trifle,” Norwegian baus “arrogant; irascible” and bause “put on airs” (which partly explains the sense of Dutch boos and Germa