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It is my practice in researching the history of a word to see if I can glean any intelligence about the future of the word as well.

To do this I usually check out Urbandictionary. There’s a lot of trash there but occasionally I see a word being used as slang with a meaning I’d never have known otherwise.

Here’s what one entry says for size.

A superior adjective for such words as cool, rad and awesome. Slip this word into any conversation and your friends will be amazed, hot women and wealth will soon follow!

As it happens, there are considerably more votes against this entry than for it so one must suppose as a slang word it doesn’t have much traction.

A slightly more popular entry at Urbandictionary uses size as a synonym for evaluate.

This entry has about even votes for and against. I’m thinking it’s along the lines of “size up a situation.”

As it turns out this evaluate usage is right-on in terms of the etymology of size.

When size first appears in English back before the year 1300 it did not mean “dimension” or “magnitude.”

These were the centuries after the Norman Conquest when the government was French. That government might have been a little more uncaring than the English residents would have liked, but in collecting taxes from the people it was doing just about the same thing our governments do to us today.

To calculate how much tax needed to be paid, a sort of judicial council sat in judgment. They considered the resources you had and then decided what a fair rate of tax was.

Because the government was French these councils went by a French name. Back in France this had been l’assise. You might recognize an English word meaning “court of judgment,” assize.

That French name l’assise is a bit of an abbreviation for la assise meaning in English “the assize.” But English speakers got confused and assumed it was short for la sise, “the size.” Thus for a while there in Middle English both the word size and the word assize meant a judicial body making decisions on justice and taxation.

To make a long story short, the idea that this gang of judges could determine the magnitude of your tax bill lead to the word size taking on a meaning of “magnitude.”

This was about 1400 and shows up first in an old document that represents a popular but unusual form of entertainment from that period.

Most of the earlier manuscripts are religious in nature and this continued to be true. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were written at this time and although generally entertaining, they had a religious thread. Even documents purporting to tell the history of England and the world were pretty religious.

This particular document was instead about the history of Alexander the Great. Only a few fragments have survived of these Alexander Romances as they are called. But they were so widely known at the time that Geoffrey Chaucer has one of his characters talking about them and making it plain that everyone already knows their stories.

There’s actually more to the story of the word size and I’m going to get to the bottom of it—literally—in tomorrow’s episode; distributed, as are all the Thursday episodes, on the Oxford University Press blog.

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