"What is the oldest English word? How to define this requires some thought." by Talia Felix, Assistant Editor
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/chasing-the-oldest-english-word
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/chasing-the-oldest-english-word
2 Likes
Could the answer vary depending on oneâs current reason for asking the question?
If todayâs government in Iceland (a country of nearly 400,000 people who mostly speak Icelandic) foolishly allowed 500,000 new immigrants who speak French to all move there tomorrow, a new language couldnât emerge by next week, could it?
Does a language need to already exist before a person can speak it? If I landed next to those Scandinavians and asked them âPlease teach me the new language of this placeâ, I might have gotten some funny looks. Or worse.
Large influxes of new immigrants often donât get along with the people who were already there, and vice versa; itâs often the children born after the drastic shift has happened (or who were very young at the time) who first recognize that the only sensible thing to do is get along with everyone else as much as possible, and who therefore hammer out a way they and their friends can all talk together.
The Scandinavians who gathered after landing their ships surely didnât say one word that was unfamiliar to their parents. But I can see at the same time that their speech was happening in a new context and deserves to be considered part of something new. In a way, they did speak the first English. In another way, their grandchildren might have been the first babies to grow up hearing their parents speak something like what English was to become, the first to grow up knowing English existed (whether they had a name for it or not), and the first to be justified in writing âMother Tongue: Englishâ on their passport applications.
But it must be inconvenient when someone asks âWhat was the first English word?â to respond âDefine Englishâ. 
1 Like
Thought provoking!
The way I would do it, is what words are in the âEnglishâ lexicon TODAY, and what is the earliest it was used in ANY language, since many/most English words will have come from a previous language.
For example âDOGMAâ is spelled the same in English as it is in Greek. Therefore, since it sits firmly in the English language today, it can be traced back to Greek texts which predate ALL the invasions of England (Vikings, Romans, Britons).
What English words could we find spelled identically in cuneform from the fertile crescent? Maybe there are none, so we can say Englishâs earliest word(s) came from Greek civilization?
One of my favorite suppositions/theories is for the etymology for vernacular. It had to have come from Latins making fun of the âmountain peopleâ-speak of the local Mount Verna yocals. I went to school in the mountains of Pennsylvania, and we had fun learning all the mountain-people words (like âbuggyâ for spoiled food), including their accent. We would adopt the local vernacular in jest, practising our mountain-folk accents for pure joy, but I continue to call food âbuggyâ to this day (with a wry smile on my face to the unitiaed listeners-- aka my kids! LOL).
I think we could document the intersection of languages (How many words could be in a Greek AND English dictionary if we could use a database to merge or âvennâ the intersection?).
If we timestamp all the words, and pay close attention to spellings, we could have a splendid database which could be used to do for lexicography what sportscasters do for baseball or basketball stats (most of which are meaningless, but darned if their databases donât come up with some really interesting comparisons of old and young players!).
I also did my own personal history of ârock and rollâ to see if there was a seminal song. I found there was: âRock Around the Clockâ by Bill Haley and the Comets. I also found 3 or 4 similar songs in what iâd consider to be different genres, one of which was done near the same nieghborhood in Philadelphia area as Bill Haley (Jimmy Preston)-- they shared stages sometimes. So rock and roll was born from jazz, blues, and country (Hank Williams has a song almost identical to Rock Around the Clock). What I found interesting is that it was almost objective result-- the first Rock song-- instead of being subjective. Thatâs debatable of course, but like you pointed out, when can we say the Angles, Sax, Britons, and Romans all melded together and began speaking and writing ENGLISH? Iâd say thatâs probably more subjective, but is it? English is what people speak today, which we can clearly identify as English-speakers almost precisely. But one day, perhaps in a new dark ages, people will be isolated from one another, and English will bastardize into 2, 3, and many new languages just as Latin did (French, Spanish, Portugese and even English itself to a lesser extent).
Iâd like to see more objectivity in language, and I think we can do it online just like we do it naturally in everyday speech. But with a sprinkling (a LIGHT sprinkling please) of tech and lots and lots of peopleâs contributions and research, I think language will become as well-documented as sports-- better in fact bc language is far more useful.
You canât find the oldest English word in a language other than English. Or I guess you can, if you reinterpret the question entirely.
The etymology theory you shared for vernacular is interesting. You have sauce for that? If true, I think it would enhance the entry for that word on this website.
Perhaps you could build something beautiful with your baseball-etymology thesis. Good luck.
The more I consider different ways to reinterpret the question, the more I think it would be a good idea to come up with a better question instead.
[quote=âScott, post:5, topic:90, username:Scottâ]
You canât find the oldest English word in a language other than English.[/quote]
The first recorded words of a language are usually in the margins of writings of languages such as Latin, and interspersed words.
1 Like
Thank you â I can see why that would be, now that youâve said it, but the idea never occurred to me. (IMO that doesnât make Scottâs point wrong, but tends to confirm it, while also showing where to look for examples.)
Edited to add: I guess, the way Scott has used it, thereâs more than one way to interpret the phrase âin Englishâ. One of them is âthe writers believe theyâre using English as opposed to some other languageâ, which they would believe while making notes in the margin or inserting words. Another is âthe document is written in Englishâ, which of course is not what you described.
To give some credit here⌠The English language, like all identities, must have blurry and ambiguous boundaries. The same reality can be seen even in something as simple as a chair. There are some pieces of furniture that push the boundary of what a chair is, so far, that you question if you know what a chair is at all.
Asking for the first English word seems similar to asking for a strict boundary from something that does not have one.
I would say, if a writer believes they are using a language other than English, the first English word probably is not to be found there.
1 Like
My theory on vernacular is just a theory, but also consider the Volsci people lived in and around the volcanos which dot around Naples, and we have a similar word in âvulgarâ or vol-gar, which basically alludes to âbaseâ language of âmountain peopleâ. The short answer is: I do NOT have any archeaologic or etymologic substance to vernacular, just the intuition of someone who has bridged the gap between how city-folk think about country-folk. YET, in a recent court case, the judges and barrister had to use Urban Dictionary to understand what some violent criminals were saying. So often, itâs the peasants and the vulgar who end up creating the language that scholars and haughty academics then pour over thinking thereâs some exact science to language or âproperâ English. My grandmother would scold me for saying âainâtâ and it worked, I mostly stopped saying it. But in 100 years it will just be part of English and teachers will scold students for âusing it wrongâ. Think also of all the changes in spellings, for haphazard reasons. Sometimes its Old Man Webster or the German intelligentsia governing it, but often not-- just the VAGaries of peasants and the masses adopting the terms of their underworld poets, lyricists, and other hereos from the hoods.
Been reading more middle and old english lately for research purposes, and itâs simply amazing what a couple hundred years can do to a language. Think of the massive changes which occured with the invasion of William from Normandy, bringing with him (to court even) all the French/Frankish and Norse/Dane lingo, which the Ang-lish were practically forced to observe.
Iâve spent a decent amount of time writing definitions, with the etymologies taking up the most time, and one thing I find fascinating when doing an etymology is how spelling changes, and WHEN it changes.
Iâve been recently trying to do an excellent etymology for the word paramount (which is why I find myself on this site often), and itâs etymology is fascinating. Not so much fascinating in the general etymological sense, but fascinating in how that word breaks down (para and mont, or before/in-front-of the mountain), but how it was written by the Norman French in Land Law, during Sir Thomas Littletonâs era.
For instance, the word likely stems from Old French paramont (see this website), which isnât spelled how we spell it today, with the u. But I think a wordâs TRUE etymology includes the EXACT spelling, so âparamountâ's best citation (i found) was Sir Lyttletonâs law/land treatise, which was written in âLaw Frenchâ first. So paramount, an English word, was first a French word, in that exact spelling. But what is French, what is English and what is Norse? Hard to say, because Law French is likely an amalgam of all three.
But to ME, paramountâs etymology can be solidly traced to the earliest citation of that spelling we can find (if you can find something older than Sir Thomas Lyttletonâs âTenuresâŚâ legal treatise, please do email me at SLictionaryLLC@gmail.com ), and that spelling is likely âLaw Frenchâ or âOld Frenchâ, but basically the French language.
So how would paramount fit as a competitor for oldest English word? How would you mark itâs first use and citation? Would you demand it be cited earliest in a cleaerly English text? Or is Sir Littletonâs âTenuresâŚâ the first citation?
Whereas âparamontâ is likely CLEARLY French and french only (other than some misspellings by English peoples). But paramount, with the âuâ, is English, like an adopted French child who grew up in London with English as a first language before he could speak.
So for me, I think etymologies should END with the first citation of the exact spelling. Paramount is likely the 2nd half of the 1400s in at least written form. Paramont is not an English word, and therefore itâs etymology should be in a French dictionary.
As for para and mont, those pieces of paramount are definitely interesting to a philologist, but if we were to get scientific about our word origin plots, para and mont would be etymologies for the french word paramont, and English speakers should only âcheck it out of the French etymonline libraryâ. Thatâs just how it could be a more draconian or precise Etymonline, but thatâs for Doug to decide if he wants to take on French! (if he decided to be more scientific about it).
I think youâre overvaluing exact spelling. In the past there was more variation in how words were spelled.
I still think that finding the oldest word in a language is absurd. (âBut what is French, what is English and what is Norse?â)
Say there is a people that all speaks the same language. The people grow larger and larger in number until some of them live very far away from one another. There comes a point when changes in language do not propagate fast enough to maintain unity among all the people. There is then a spectrum of language where you may be able to communicate well enough with those close to you, but struggle to communicate with those far from you. You might even be able to say that the opposite ends of this spectrum are then distinct languages. A language is born with lots of words inherited from its mother.
1 Like
I rather like the idea of trying to quantize language, and Iâm not alone (or AI wouldnât be an industry right now). I think finding the oldest English word isnât even all that of a huge problem, going forward, but difficult in the past because we didnât have a recording system like weâve had since dictionaries were born just a couple hundred years ago (and also until the prevelance of print, just a few hundred years ago).
Again, I think you CAN trace the oldest English word, by simply first:
- Determine what is currently an English word
- List all of them
- Do etymology to see how far back they originate. This work already started with Sir Murray and the Philologists.
4). Use spellings as the rigorous test. Paramount is not Para (latin) nor Mont (greek) nor Paramont (French), it is English parmount, and it might stretch between two language, which is fine, just like King Rollo or William the Conquerer may be two lines of two or three different countries (Norse, Frankish, French, English, and even Welch etcâŚ).
5). Then just rank the age of the spellings, or if you choose a different criteria, the age of the citational work/book in which it first appears.
And yes, I agree with you that first we must define what âEnglishâ is. Is Old English the same as todayâs âModern Englishâ? Or should they be two seperate languages. But by âagreeing to termsâ we can then measure. This is no different than any game or effort which has a defined protocol. Without agreed rules, there is hardly measure of anything (Weights != masses for example, even in science there must be pre-agreed rules).
In short, I think the spellings offer a line of interest; but like you, I donât put so much meaning behind the difference. I merely think they can be effectively used to aide protocol/definitions of what we want to measure-- in this case the oldest English word, or tomorrow something else.
How would it be any different than mapping all the living things in the world, by classes and families, and then the maddening attempt to give each species a latin name!? Biology is absurd in this way, but it doesnât stop them from trying, and making up protocols (which rarely but sometimes change, when things like genetics comes along).
When you look at the rainbow you cannot tell exactly where the yellow stops and the green begins because the spectrum of solar light is continuous.
Of course someone might assert that the green extends precisely between 500 and 600 nm, but that would be an arbitrary criterion anyone else could easily dispute, and arguing whether at 605.08 nm youâre still in the green would be a pitiful waste of valuable time.
The way languages and dialects change across space and time recalls very closely the concept of âcontinuumâ : in the Middle Ages one could travel afoot through much of Europe without knowingly switching language â and that not because there was a common language spoken all along the way but because every new day the local language changed so imperceptibly that the traveler wouldnât notice the difference.
Just as with green and yellow, most of the times itâs a cinch to determine if a word belongs to English, Old English, German, Mittelfränkisch, Old Norse or whatever else, but there are countless borderline cases where such a labelling becomes virtually impossible.
Thatâs why I suspect that any attempt to put each word in its own language box would be doomed to failure.