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aeroplane: aeroplane: [19] The prefix aero- comes ultimately from Greek āér ‘air’, but many of the terms containing it (such as aeronaut and aerostat) reached English via French. This was the case, too, with aeroplane, in the sense of ‘heavier-than-air flying machine’. The word was first used in English in 1873 (30 years before the Wright brothers’ first flight), by D S Brown in the Annual Report of the Aeronautical Society – he refers vaguely to an aeroplane invented by ‘a Frenchman’.

The abbreviated form plane followed around 1908. (An earlier, and exclusively English, use of the word aeroplane was in the sense ‘aerofoil, wing’; this was coined in the 1860s, but did not long survive the introduction of the ‘aircraft’ sense.) Aeroplane is restricted in use mainly to British English (and even there now has a distinctly old-fashioned air). The preferred term in American English is airplane, a refashioning of aeroplane along more ‘English’ lines which is first recorded from 1907.
=> air
aluminium: aluminium: [19] Aluminium comes from a coinage by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy, who discovered the metal. His first suggestion was alumium, which he put forward in Volume 98 of the Transactions of the Royal Society 1808: ‘Had I been so fortunate as … to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium’.

He based it on Latin alūmen ‘alum’ (alum is a sulphate of aluminium, and the word alum, a 14th-century borrowing from French, derives ultimately from alūmen; alumina is an oxide of aluminium, and the word alumina is a modern Latin formation based on alūmen, which entered English at the end of the 18th century); and alūmen may be linked with Latin alūta ‘skins dried for making leather, using alum’.

Davy soon changed his mind, however, and in 1812 put forward the term aluminum – which remains the word used in American English to this day. British English, though, has preferred the form aluminium, which was mooted contemporaneously with aluminum on grounds of classical ‘correctness’: ‘Aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound’, Quarterly Review 1812.
=> alum
aubergine: aubergine: [18] Etymologically, the aubergine is the ‘anti-fart vegetable’. That was the meaning of its ultimate source, Sanskrit vātinganah, so named because it did not produce intestinal gas. This was borrowed into Persian as bādingān, and reached Arabic as (with the definite article al) al-bādindjān. It then made its way with the Moors into the Iberian peninsula: here it produced Portuguese beringela (source of brinjal [18], an Indian and African English term for ‘aubergine’) and, with the definite article retained, Catalan alberginia.

French turned this into aubergine and passed it on to English. In British English it has gradually replaced the earlier eggplant, named after the vegetable’s shape, which American English has retained.
bromide: bromide: [19] Potassium bromide is used as a sedative, and it was that which inspired the American humorist Gelett Burgess’s book Are You A Bromide? (1906), in which he metaphoricized bromide as a ‘dull conventional person’. In British English it is the more abstract figurative sense ‘trite or conventional remark’ that has caught on. Bromide was based on bromine [19], the name of a liquid element, which in turn was formed from French brome. The element was so christened, from Greek brōmos ‘stench’, because of its highly irritant and unpleasant smell.
burk: burk: [20] Although burk is now the commoner spelling, presumably under the influence of the proper name Burk, the original form of the word was berk. It is short for Berkeley (or perhaps Berkshire) hunt, rhyming slang for cunt. (The Berkeley hunt chases foxes in Gloucestershire.) The pronunciation of the word represents, of course, the dialectal or nonstandard version of Berkeley/Berkshire, rather than the /ba:k/ which became standard in southern British English from the 15th century.
carbuncle: carbuncle: [13] Etymologically, a carbuncle is a ‘small piece of coal’. It comes ultimately from Latin carbunculus, a diminutive form of carbō ‘coal’ (source of English carbon). This reached English via Old French carbuncle. The Latin word had two main metaphorical meanings, based on the idea of a glowing coal: ‘red gem’ and ‘red inflamed spot’, both of which passed into English.

The latter achieved some notoriety in British English in the 1980s following a remark by the Prince of Wales in 1984 comparing a piece of modern architecture unfavourably to a ‘carbuncle’, although ironically from the 15th to the 17th centuries the word was used for ‘something of great splendour’.
=> carbon
carcass: carcass: [14] English first acquired this word from Anglo-Norman carcois, and early forms were carcays and carcoys. Spellings similar to modern English carcass begin to emerge in the 16th century, and may be due to reborrowing from French carcasse, to association with the noun case ‘container’, which meant ‘body’ in the 16th century, or to a combination of both. The usual current spelling throughout the English-speaking world is carcass, but British English also uses carcase. The word’s ultimate origin is unknown.
caucus: caucus: [18] Caucus ‘closed party meeting’ is believed to be of native American origin. Certainly its early usage was restricted to the USA (it did not reach British English until the 1870s, when it became something of a political buzzword for a time). In form and meaning it strongly resembles caucauasu, a word meaning ‘counsellor’ in the Algonquian languages of eastern Canada and the USA which was recorded in print by Captain John Smith (1580– 1631), an early English colonist in America.
check: check: There are two distinct words check in English, although by very involved pathways they are related. Check ‘verify’ [14] is originally a chess term meaning ‘threaten the king’. It comes from Old French eschequier, a derivative of the noun eschec (source also of English chess), which goes back via Vulgar Latin *scaccus and Arabic shāh to Persian shāh ‘king’ (whence also, of course, English shah). (Checkmate [14] comes via Old French eschec mat from Persian shāh māt ‘the king is left helpless’; the second element turns up again in mat or matt ‘lustreless’.) From the very specific chess sense there developed more general applications such as ‘attack’, ‘arrest’, ‘stop’, ‘restrict’, and ‘verify’.

Among these in the 18th century was ‘token used as a counterfoil for verifying something, such as an amount’. As check this survives mainly in American English (as in ‘hat-check’), but in the specific financial sense of ‘written money order’ it was transformed in British English into cheque, perhaps under the influence of exchequer. Check ‘pattern of squares’ [14] is probably short for chequer, which in turn is a reduced form of exchequer, a word derived ultimately from Vulgar Latin *scaccus ‘check’.
=> cheque, chess, exchequer
curb: curb: [15] Ultimately, curb and curve are the same word. Latin curvāre ‘bend’ passed into Old French as courber, which Middle English borrowed as courbe ‘bend’. This seems to have formed the basis of a noun courbe or curb, which was originally used for a strap to restrain a horse, the underlying meaning perhaps being that pulling on the strap ‘bent’ the horse’s neck, thereby restraining it.

The sense ‘enclosing framework’ began to emerge in the early 16th century, perhaps mainly through the influence of the French noun courbe, which meant ‘curved piece of timber, iron, etc used in building’. Its chief modern descendant is ‘pavement edge’, a 19th-century development, which has generally been spelled kerb in British English.
=> circle, crown, curve
dice: dice: [14] Dice originated, as every schoolboy knows, as the plural of die, which it has now virtually replaced in British English as the term for a ‘cube marked with numbers’. Die itself comes via Old French de from Latin datum, the past participle of the verb dare (and source also of English date). The main meaning of dare was ‘give’, but it also had the secondary sense ‘play’, as in ‘play a chess piece’.

The plural of the Old French word was dez (itself occasionally used as a singular), which gave rise to such Middle English forms as des, dees, and deys and, by around 1500, dyse. The singular die survives for ‘dice’ in American English, and also in the later subsidiary sense ‘block or other device for stamping or impressing’ (which originated around 1700).
=> date, donate
get: get: [13] Get, now one of the most pervasive of English words, has only been in the language for the (comparatively) short period of 800 years. It was borrowed from Old Norse geta (although a related, hundred-per-cent English -get, which occurs in beget and forget, dates back to Old English times). Both come via a prehistoric Germanic *getan from Indo-European *ghed-, which signified ‘seize’ (guess is ultimately from the same source). Gotten is often quoted as an American survival of a primeval past participle since abandoned by British English, but in fact the original past participle of got was getten, which lasted into the 16th century; gotten was a Middle English innovation, based on such models as spoken and stolen. Got originated as an abbreviated form of gotten, which in due course came to be used, on both sides of the Atlantic, as the past tense of the verb (replacing the original gat).
=> beget, forget, guess
haberdasher: haberdasher: [14] No one is too sure what Anglo-Norman hapertas meant – perhaps ‘piece of cloth’, perhaps ‘small goods’ – but it is the nearest we can come to the origin of that curious word haberdasher. The theory is that it had an Anglo-Norman derivative, *habertasser or *haberdasser, never actually recorded, which passed into Middle English as haberdassher.

The term seems originally to have denoted a ‘seller of small fancy goods’ – and indeed in the 16th and 17th centuries it was often used synonymously with milliner, which had a similar broad meaning in those days – but gradually it passed into two more specific applications, ‘seller of hats’ (now obsolete in British English, but surviving in the American sense ‘seller of men’s hats, gloves, etc’) and ‘seller of dressmaking accessories’.
infant: infant: [14] Etymologically, an infant is ‘someone who cannot yet speak’. The word comes via Old French enfant from Latin infāns ‘young child’, a noun use of the adjective infāns, originally ‘unable to speak’, which was formed from the negative prefix in- and the present participle of fārī ‘speak’ (source of English fable, fame, fate, etc).

The somewhat improbable derivative infantry [16] comes via French from Italian infanteria; this was based on infante, whose original meaning ‘young person’ had shifted to ‘foot soldier’ (a development distantly reminiscent of the use of British English lads for ‘male members of a group, team, etc’).
=> fable, fame, fate
jail: jail: [13] Etymologically, a jail is a ‘little cage’. The word comes ultimately from Vulgar Latin *gaviola, which was an alteration of an earlier *caveola, a diminutive form of Latin cavea ‘cage’ (source of English cage). It passed into English in two distinct versions: jail came via Old French jaiole; but the Old Northern French form of the word was gaiole, and this produced English gaol.

Until the 17th century gaol was pronounced with a hard /g/ sound, but then it gradually fell into line phonetically with jail. There has been a tendency for British English to use the spelling gaol, while American prefers jail, but there are now signs that jail is on the increase in Britain.
=> cage
lig: lig: [20] The verb lig, meaning ‘freeload, sponge’, and its derivative ligger, achieved a particular prominence in late 20th-century British English. But in fact its roots go back far into the past. In origin it is simply a variant version of the verb lie ‘recline’. In Old English times this was licgan, and although in the mainstream language licgan became lie, liggen survived dialectally. The sense ‘lie about’ passed naturally into ‘lounge about lazily’, and apparently merged with another dialectal sense ‘steal’ to produce the word’s current meaning.
=> lie
pants: pants: [19] Pants is short for pantaloons, a term used since the 17th century for men’s nether garments. The word originated in the name of a character in the old Italian commedia dell’arte, Pantalone, a silly old man with thin legs who encased them in tight trousers. English took the word over via French pantalon, and began to use it for ‘tight breeches or trousers’.

In American English it broadened out to ‘trousers’ generally, whence the current American use of pants for ‘trousers’. British English, however, tends to use the abbreviation for undergarments, perhaps influenced by pantalets, a 19th-century diminutive denoting ‘women’s long frilly drawers’.
switch: switch: [16] Switch originally denoted a ‘thin flexible twig’; it may have been borrowed from Middle Dutch swijch ‘bough, twig’. From the noun was derived the verb switch. This originally meant ‘beat with a switch’, but in the early 19th century the sense ‘bend or waggle to and fro like a flexible stick’ emerged, and this led on in the middle of the century via ‘divert’ to ‘turn off a train on to another track’ (the usage developed in American English, where the apparatus used for this is still known as a switch, as opposed to British English points).

By the end of the century this had broadened out to ‘connect or disconnect by pushing a contact to or fro’. The notion of ‘exchanging’ or ‘swopping’ did not emerge until as recently as the 1890s.
tarmac: tarmac: [20] The term tarmac commemorates the name of John Loudon McAdam (1756–1836), a Scottish civil engineer who developed a method of levelling roads and covering them with gravel. Setting the gravel in tar produced in the 1880s the term tarmacadam, and in 1903 the abbreviated form tarmac was registered as a trademark. By 1919 the word was being used in British English as a synonym for ‘runway’.
torch: torch: [13] A torch is etymologically something ‘twisted’. The word comes via Old French torche from Vulgar Latin *torca, which was derived from the Latin verb torquēre ‘twist’ (source also of English torment, torture, etc). The notion underlying the word is of pieces of straw or similar material ‘twisted’ together and then dipped in some inflammable material. That is what it still denotes in American English, but in British English it has been reapplied to a battery-driven alternative to this.
=> torment, torque, torture
tyre: tyre: [15] The word tyre was originally used for a protective covering of metal plates put round the rim of a wooden wheel. It is thought that it was short for attire [13] (a borrowing from Old French, but ultimately of unknown origin), the notion being of ‘attiring’ the wheels in their covering. At first the word was spelled tire or tyre indiscriminately. By the 18th century tire had become the standard form, and it remains so in American English, but when rubber wheel cushions were introduced in the 19th century, British English took to spelling them tyre.
=> attire
aggrandisement (n.): chiefly British English spelling of aggrandizement. See -ize.
airplane (n.): 1907, from air (n.1) + plane (n.1); though the original references are British, the word caught on in American English, where it largely superseded earlier aeroplane (1873 in this sense and still common in British English). Aircraft "airplane" also is from 1907. Lord Byron, speculatively, used air-vessel (1822).
amortisation (n.): chiefly British English spelling of amortization; see -ize.
amortise (v.): chiefly British English spelling of amortize; for suffix, see -ize. Related: Amortised; amortising.
amphitheatre (n.): chiefly British English spelling of amphitheater. See -er.
analyse (v.): chiefly British English spelling of analyze (q.v.).
Analyse is better than analyze, but merely as being the one of the two equally indefensible forms that has won. The correct but now impossible form would be analysize (or analysise), with analysist for existing analyst. [Fowler]
antagonise (v.): chiefly British English spelling of antagonize; see -ize. Related: Antagonised; antagonising.
apologise (v.): chiefly British English spelling of apologize; for suffix, see -ize. Related: Apologised; apologising.
arbour (n.): chiefly British English spelling of arbor (q.v.); for spelling, see -or.
ardour (n.): chiefly British English spelling of ardor (q.v.); for spelling, see -or.
armour: chiefly British English spelling of armor (q.v.); for suffix, see -or.
armoury (n.): chiefly British English spelling of armory (q.v.); for suffix, see -or.
arms race (n.): 1930, in reference to naval build-ups, from arms (see arm (n.2)) + race (n.1). First used in British English.
authorisation (n.): chiefly British English spelling of authorization (q.v.); for spelling, see -ize.
authorise (v.): chiefly British English spelling of authorize (q.v.); for suffix, see -ize. Related: Authorised; authorising.
bally (adj.): 1885, British English, slang euphemism for bloody.
banger (n.): British English slang for "a sausage," 1919, perhaps from sense of "a bludgeon," though this is recorded only in U.S. slang.
baptise (v.): chiefly British English spelling of baptize; for spelling, see -ize. Related: Baptised; baptising.
behaviour (n.): chiefly British English spelling of behavior; for suffix, see -or.
behavioural (adj.): chiefly British English spelling of behavioral (q.v.); for spelling, see -or.
behove: chiefly British English spelling of behoove.
belabour (v.): chiefly British English spelling of belabor (q.v.); for spelling, see -or.
bint (n.): "girlfriend," 1855, British English, from Arabic bint "daughter;" adopted by British servicemen in the Middle East.
bounder (n.): 1560s, "one who sets bounds," agent noun from bound (v.1); British English slang meaning "person of objectionable social behavior, would-be stylish person," is from 1882, perhaps from bound (v.2) on notion of one trying to "bound" into high society, but earliest usage suggests one outside the "bounds" of acceptable socializing, which would connect it with the noun.
bugger (n.): "sodomite," 1550s, earlier "heretic" (mid-14c.), from Medieval Latin Bulgarus "a Bulgarian" (see Bulgaria), so called from bigoted notions of the sex lives of Eastern Orthodox Christians or of the sect of heretics that was prominent there 11c. Compare Old French bougre "Bulgarian," also "heretic; sodomite." Softened secondary sense of "fellow, chap," is in British English from mid-19c. Related: Buggerly.
calibre (n.): chiefly British English spelling of caliber (q.v.); for spelling, see -re.
candour (n.): chiefly British English spelling of candor (q.v.); for spelling, see -or.
capitalise (v.): chiefly British English spelling of capitalize (q.v.). For suffix, see -ize.
catechise (v.): chiefly British English spelling of catechize; for suffix, see -ize. Related: Catechised; catechising.