podictionary - the podcast for word lovers

An old episode from May 2006

The other day I mentioned that Richard Lederer had brought up a word with an interesting background and “umpire” is the word.

An umpire is of course the official who enforces the rules in baseball and a number of other sports.  In some sports the official isn’t called an umpire but a referee instead.  Obviously a referee is someone to whom we refer such decisions.  Referees have been around for about 400 years but only about 160 as sports officials.

Umpires have been around for 600 years and about 300 years in sport.

But before they were umpires the title came to English from French and it was noumpere.

Even in today’s English we can understand the meaning of this word if we break it into “non” “peer” so the umpire was someone who didn’t have any equals—no peers—he was above the people he was judging.

It didn’t take English speakers long to confuse the phrase “a noumpere” and move the N across to the first word “an umpire.”

This happened with a number of words.  An adder, a snake, was in Old English “a nadder”; and an auger, the thing you dig holes for fence posts with, was “a nauger”.

The opposite happened as well.  Some words started in English without a leading N but had one attached because people thought it sounded better.  One example of this is “nickname.”

Do you have a nickname?  700 years ago I would have asked you if you had “an eke name” and before that “eke name” was two words.  “Eke” in Old English meant “something added” and that is why we eke out our existence.

In order to keep existing we constantly have to keep adding something, particularly to our mouths in the form of food.