Looking Up a Gun: Common English Words with Nordic Origins

Old Norse words in the English language are much more numerous than many would suspect. Many common words such as  gun, craze, and equip are of Nordic origin. Because the two languages were so similar, they have many loanwords. Often, they were mutually intelligible to quite a degree. In this post, I’m going to analyze the origins of these three common English words rooted in the Old Norse language.

There were a two main ways that Old Norse words made their way into the English language. First, between 865 and 954 (the Danelaw), the Vikings colonized eastern and northern England. During this time, many of their Old Norse words entered the Old English and have been in use  since. Other words entered the Norman French and were passed on from there to Middle English during the Norman Conquest of 1066. The parallels between Old Norse and Old English facilitated the trading of words between the two languages.

Gun

In Nordic culture, the name Gunnhildr was fairly common. It had the meaning “war battle maid” and is a cognate to the more modern name, “Gunhild”. In 1330, Windsor Castle had an inventory of it’s munitions made. In the inventory, a specific siege engine was called the Lady Gunilda, a shortening of Gunnhildr. Later, the word gonnilde, yet another variation of Gunnhildr, became more generalized to mean “cannon” in Middle English. By the mid-fourteenth century, these had been shortened to gunne. It did not yet have the modern meaning of “gun”, though. It meant simply “an engine of war that throws rocks, arrows or other missiles”. So, the ballista and the trebuchet both fell into this definition. It wasn’t until the fifteenth century that gunne came to mean “firearm” (because that’s when firearms first came to major use). Around that time, it was finally shortened to “gun”.

Craze

Old Norse had a word krasa, which meant “shatter”.  Around the mid-14th century, it entered the Middle French language as the word ecraser, which meant “to squash”. This evolved into both the modern French écraser, and the Middle English crasen, which meant “to break in pieces; to crack”. It also had a  second meaning, “to be diseased or deformed”. Crasen evolved into the modern English crase (now obselete), however, it only carried the first meaning, “to break in pieces; to crack”. However, crasen evolved into another modern English word, craze. This carried the second meaning, “to be diseased or deformed”. However, it had evolved into the meaning “mental breakdown”. The current meaning of the word is “to become insane; go mad”, not a far cry from “mental breakdown”. The first reference to craze meaning “mania, fad” was in 1813. However, the original meaning, “to make cracks”, is still in use a with a slightly different meaning, “to make small cracks on the surface of”. This is used when referring to ceramic pottery.

Equip

The Nordic word skip meant “ship”. Skipa, another Norse word was derived from it, with the meaning “fit out a ship”. In the twelfth century, it entered the Old French as esquiper. In the 1520s, it was used in the Middle French as équiper. It meant “to supply, fit out”, thus it was no longer specific to ships. In the late sixteenth century, it made it’s way into English as Esquippe. In the seventeenth century,  a p was dropped and the word became esquip. Later in the century, the s was dropped and it was shortened to “equip”, as we know it today. It was spelled acquip during that time, but that spelling never really caught on.

Estimates vary, but range from 15-25% of English words (non-scientific) originate from Old Norse. Given the size of the English language, that is a quite a considerable amount. Only Latin and French contribute more words to English than Old Norse. Our language owes a great deal to those ruthless Scandinavian seafarers. Without their contributions, I would not be able to say, “He often fumbled for words, which amused people greatly.” (Kylfdi mᴊǫk til orðanna, ok hǫfðu margir menn þat mᴊǫk at spotti.)

Sources

• Etymonline
• Oxford English Dictionary
• Middle English Dictionary
• germanic.zxq.net