524: hood May 15, 2016

Often, a single word will create several different derivatives (see the post from yesterday). Other times, what is now a single word would have started as many distinct ones with different morphological and phonological structures. The word 'hood' today takes 3 uses, and 1 as a suffix, but all came from different words. 'Hood' as in the clothing comes from the Old English 'hōd' and is also related to the modern word, 'hat'. The rather dated term for a criminal was abbreviated in the 1930's from 'hoodlum' and likewise the area, 'hood' is from 'neighborhood', which began in the 1970s. The suffix was initially its own word meaning 'person' or 'characteristic' from the Old English '-hād', but eventually took on different grammatical form.