Word of the Day

Erlking “a spirit that works mischief” is an adaptation of German Erlkönig “alder king.” However, the word erlking is not of ultimate German origin; Erlkönig is in fact a mistranslation, courtesy of 18th-century poet Johann Gottfried von Herder, of Danish ellerkonge, a variant of elverkonge “elf king.” Elf has an interesting history, one full of semantic shifts over time. In Middle English, elf could denote one of a multitude of supernatural entities, including fairies, goblins, incubi, succubi, and spirits in general. Cognates in other Germanic languages include German Alb “elf, nightmare” and Old Norse alfr “elf,” the latter of which was borrowed into English as oaf, and names derived from this “elf” root include Alfred, Alvin, Aubrey, Gandalf, Oberon, and even Oliver. Though the Indo-European origin of all these words is uncertain, the most promising hypothesis—based on a potential definition of “white apparition” or “white ghost”—is a connection to the Proto-Indo-European root albhos “white”; compare Latin albus “white” (as in albedo, albino, and Albus Dumbledore). Erlking was first recorded in English in the 1790s.

Eggcorn “a seemingly logical alteration of a misheard word or phrase” is a coinage by linguistics professor Geoffrey K. Pullum based on the word acorn. The logic here is that people unfamiliar with the term acorn (from Old English æcern) may mistake the word as a compound of egg and corn because of acorns’ size and shape. An eggcorn is a type of folk etymology based on an honest mistake, as we saw in the etymology for the recent Word of the Day armscye, which is often incorrectly believed to come from “arm’s eye,” after the location and shape of an armscye. What makes something an eggcorn is that, unlike folk etymology proper, which results in a change to a word or phrase based on a nearly universal misconception, eggcorns tend to reflect common mistakes at the individual level—no matter how widespread these mistakes may be—that do not change the spelling of the mistaken word or phrase. Also important is that eggcorns are based on logical misunderstandings, so not every gross misspelling on the average social media feed qualifies as an eggcorn. While eggcorn is attested as early as the early 19th century, its present sense dates from 2003.

Laisser-aller “unchecked freedom or ease” is a direct borrowing from French, in which the phrase means “to allow to go.” Laisser “to let, allow” ultimately comes from Latin laxus “loose,” which is the source of English relax, release, and relish and is a distant cognate of English slack “not tight.” The story of aller “to go” is a bit more complicated. Aller is a suppletive verb, which means that several of its inflected forms originated as borrowings from other words; while the infinitive form aller may derive either from a Celtic source or from Latin ambulāre “to walk,” the present and future forms vais “I go” and irai “I will go” come from Latin vādere and īre, respectively, both of which mean “to go.” In English, one common suppletive verb is go (with its past tense form, went, borrowed from wend “to proceed”), and suppletion is found as well with the adjectives good and bad (with comparative forms better and worse and superlative forms best and worst derived from different roots). Laisser-aller was first recorded in English in the early 19th century.

Ichnite “a fossil footprint” is a compound of the combining form ichno- “track, footstep” and the suffix -ite, which is often found in terms for minerals and fossils. Ichno- derives from Ancient Greek íchnos “track,” which is of uncertain origin, though hypotheses that lack wide acceptance include connections to Ancient Greek oíkhomai “to go away, leave, disappear,” to various Slavic words related to bodily wounds and cavities, and to Ancient Greek aikhmḗ “spear point.” Perhaps the best-known derivation of íchnos, for those of you with a passion for Ancient Greek literature, is Ichneutae, the name of a play by Sophocles that is also known variously as Searchers or Trackers in English. Ichnite was first recorded in English in the early 1850s.

Pinyin “a system for transliterating Chinese into the Latin alphabet” is a borrowing from Mandarin Chinese pīnyīn, a compound of pīn “to arrange, classify” and yīn “sound, pronunciation.” Because Chinese uses a writing system that is logographic (using symbols to indicate words) there are numerous methods that linguists have developed to romanize Chinese, that is, to transliterate the language into the Roman alphabet. While pinyin is the most popular today, the Wade–Giles and Yale systems were widespread in China throughout the 20th century. With place names specifically, the so-called “postal spellings” were used to render names such as Peking and Nanking into English. After pinyin’s adoption as the official standard of romanization in 1979, a wave of transliteration swept through China, and the most recognizable effects were the changes in place names, such as the switch from Peking and Nanking to their pinyin versions Běijīng and Nánjīng. Pinyin was first recorded in English in the mid-20th century.