Word of the Day

The Word of the Day is piebald. Piebald is a compound of pie and bald, but not with their normal definitions. The pie in piebald refers to magpies, not to the tasty pastry, and comes from the Latin words for “magpie” and “woodpecker.” The connection is based on the magpie’s black and white plumage. The bald element in piebald means “having white on its head,” as in bald eagle. Some linguists identify bald, which most often means “hairless,” as an old derivative of ball—with the shift in definition from “ball-shaped” to “smoothed” and then to “lacking hair.” Other linguists connect bald to modern English blaze, meaning “white mark on an animal’s face” or “mark made on a tree to indicate a trail,” as in recent Word of the Day trailblaze. Piebald was first recorded in English in the 1580s.

Dauntless “fearless, intrepid, bold” is a compound of the verb daunt “to overcome with fear” and the combining form -less “without.” Daunt comes from Old French donter and ultimately Latin domitāre “to tame,” a frequentative of domāre, of the same meaning. Frequentative verbs indicate repeated or frequent action, and while English does not create new frequentative verbs today, many verbs ending in -le originally fell into this category; compare bobble from bob, sparkle from spark, and wrestle from wrest. Latin domāre, and therefore daunt, is a distant relative of the words adamant “unyielding in opinion” and diamond, which both come from Ancient Greek damân “to tame.” Thanks to Grimm’s law, which states that Latin and Ancient Greek d correspond to English t, the English cognate of daunt is the verb tame. Dauntless was first recorded in English circa 1590.

Syncope “the contraction of a word by omitting sounds from the middle” comes from Ancient Greek synkopḗ “a cutting short” and is a compound of the elements syn- “together” and kop- (from kóptein “to cut”). Syn- (becoming sym- before b or p) is the Ancient Greek equivalent of the Latin-origin prefix co- “together” (as in cooperate) and appears in terms such as syndrome (literally “run together”), sympathy (“felt together”), and synthesis (“placed together”). The verb kóptein is related to comma, from Ancient Greek kómma “a piece cut off,” as well as to English hatchet—the latter because of Grimm’s law, which makes Ancient Greek k and Latin c tend to correspond to English h (compare heart and the recent Word of the Day cordiform). Syncope was first recorded in English in the late 14th century.

Sinsyne “from that time” is unusual in that it is a compound of two doublets, or words sharing a root that came into a language through different pathways, as we learned from the recent Words of the Day firth and quagmire. Much as firth is a doublet of fjord and (quag)mire is a doublet of moss, the sin- and -syne halves of sinsyne both derive from a Middle English term meaning “after”; the difference is that the sin- element is from sithen in one dialect of Middle English, while the -syne element is from sethen in a different dialect, perhaps with influence from Old Norse. Middle English sithen was combined with the adverbial suffix -s (compare always and unawares) to create sithenes “afterwards, because,” which eventually became modern English since. Sinsyne was first recorded in English in the mid-14th century.

Foehn “a warm, dry wind to the north of the Alps” is a borrowing of German Föhn; the German language often allows for vowels with umlauts (such as ö and ü) to be written instead with a subsequent e (such as oe and ue) under certain circumstances. Föhn ultimately comes from the Latin name Favōnius, which is the personification of the west wind according to Roman mythology, equivalent to Zephyrus (also Zephyros) in Greek mythology, which gives us zephyr. Favōnius may be related to the verb favēre (stem fav-) “to favor,” which is also the source of favorable and favorite. Because the vowel u and the consonant v were both represented in Latin as v, a variant of the stem fav- is fau-, as in faustus “favorable,” which may be the source of the recent Word of the Day Faustian, and perhaps as in Faunus, the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Pan. Foehn was first recorded in English in the early 1860s.