Friday words #324

Where I live (Seattle), the leaves are turning and the season has been mild and spectacularly beautiful. What season is that, you ask? Around these parts we call it fall, as in the Carole King lyric “Winter, spring, summer or fall/All you have to do is call” [video].

Another word for fall is autumn. Since I’m citing lyrics, we could go with “But I miss you most of all my darling/When autumn leaves start to fall,” from “Autumn Leaves,” a translation of the French song “Les Feuilles Mortes.” (“When autumn leaves start to fall,” nice.) Not that you asked, but my favorite version of this song is by Eva Cassidy [video].

Maybe it’s a bit unusual that we have two widely used words for the season. The word autumn entered English from French around 1400. It ultimately comes from Latin autumnus, whose meaning and origin aren’t uber-clear. Douglas Harper suggests that it was “perhaps influenced by auctus ‘increase’”; the OED suggests that maybe it came from Etruscan, a likely source of a fair number of Latin words that can’t be ascribed to Indo-European.

It surprised me to learn that the word fall is a later addition to our lexicon than autumn. Fall is a shortening of fall of the leaf, a colorful image that makes the word feel older than it apparently is. Not to mention that the word fall is definitely more Germanic than autumn. Although fall originated in Britain, the word autumn took over won out there. In North America, both terms are used, but fall became the more common term. (See also the comment from Robin about the use of autumn in other Anglophone regions of the world.)

You might think that surely English had a word for fall/autumn before 1400—? Indeed it did: that word was harvest (hærfest in Old English). This is the Germanic term, which shows up in German as Herbst and in Dutch as herfst. Today we still know the term harvest, of course, as both a noun and a verb. Interestingly, it appears that in Old English, hærfest was used primarily as the name of the season. The verb for harvesting was rīpan, “to reap.”

It turns out that the autumn/fall/harvest season is not the only one with a verb-based name. The season that follows winter is of course spring. Unlike fall/autumn, the word spring is equally popular in all (most?) parts of the English-speaking world for that time of year.

Spring is not just the calendrical opposite of fall, so to speak—it’s also the lexical opposite. Leaves fall in October. Whereas in March, plants spring forth from the earth and buds spring from the trees. In the seasonal sense, spring is a shortening of springing time or spring of the leaf. This comes from a sense of to spring that meant “first appearance; beginning” that could apply to plants, sure, and also to things like sunrise. (The German name for spring is Frühling, based on the word früh for “early.”)

So check it out: we’ve got fall (of the leaf) and spring (of the leaf) for two of our seasons.[1]

As with fall, spring to refer to the season is a comparatively late addition to English, also appearing sometime in the 1500s. This again raises the question of what word the Anglo-Saxons used for the springing time. It turns out that the Old English word for spring was lencten.

When I learned about lencten, my first thought was that it must come from Lent. Nope, it’s the other way around. When the Anglo-Saxons were Christianized, they named the 40-day period before Easter Lenten, based on their extant word for spring. The word lencten comes from the same Germanic root that gives us long, length, and lengthen. Spring i.e. lencten was a time when days got longer.

As an aside, the word Lent to refer to the religious period seems to be unique to English. For example, in German it’s Fastenzeit and in Dutch vastentijd (both for “fasting-time”); in Spanish Cuaresma and in French carême (both from Latin quadragesima, “forty”).

That leaves us (haha) with the other two seasons: summer and winter. The OED says that “it has been argued” that the Germanic languages show evidence of an older system that named just two seasons. Summer has a relative in the Sanskrit word sama for “half-year.” Winter might be related to the words wet or water, or possibly to white or wind. Whichever of these possible roots might be the real one, the intent certainly seems clear.

Lecten/spring and harvest/autumn/fall therefore seem like names that people added as they settled into certain lands and that they needed in order to describe certain times and activities.

And this trend continues even to this day. So, for example, because we need additional words for certain times and activities, fairly recently we added to English the name of another season: pumpkin spice season. 🙂

Like this? Read all the Friday words.

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[1] Since I keep citing lyrics, there’s this from “Waters of March,” a translation of the Jobim song “Águas De Março” [Susanna McCorkle video]:

A fish, a flash
A wish, a wing
It’s a hawk, it’s a dove
It’s the promise of spring
And the riverbank sings
Of the waters of March
It’s the end of despair
It’s the joy in your heart