The other day I needed to reshevel my office.

It’s not often I want to suggest a new word, but I like this one.

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A new word is a good word if it doesn’t need explaining.  You knew right away what resheveled meant didn’t you?  It’s recovered from being disheveled.

I’m not wholly original in this.  Depending on how you spell it Google brings up 3, 5 or 7 hits.

A new word is only really good if other people pick it up and start using it and I really don’t have any expectations of that so let’s move on from this is an aside.

The word disheveled is an even better word because, first of all people already use it, and second of all it has an unexpected etymology.

The American Heritage Dictionary says disheveled means

“being in loose disarray; unkempt…marked by disorder; untidy”

They give an example of “a disheveled pile of books.”

But the roots of the word disheveled are in Latin.  The Latin word for “head” is caput and the hair on the head is capillus in Latin.  This gave rise to the French word for hair cheveau.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

Geoffrey Chaucer used the word dishevley in The Canterbury Tales and by it he meant “bald.”  That’s because earlier in Latin and then in French decapullatus and then deschevele took the de- prefix to mean “without.”

So someone who was disheveled was without hair.

Somehow this changed over time and instead started to mean that someone who was disheveled was “without a hat” covering their hair.  Clearly someone without anything covering their hair is prone to having the wind and weather make a mess of their hair. That’s when the meaning started to mean “in disarray.”

For these reasons the word dishevel grew out of disheveled and not the other way around.

Unfortunately for my new word, there is already a word shevel and has been since 1725.

Instead of being the opposite of dishevel as I’d like it to be, shevel actually comes from a different etymology and means “distorted” so is almost a synonym.