2888: Book: Surviving Against the Odds Nov 17, 2024

The word ‘book’ is an old one in English, with roots going back to Proto-Germanic thousands of years ago, and possibly has to do with a common material for carving runes: beech wood. It is rare that over the course of Middle English, it would eclipse another term of the same meaning, especially a foreign one. After the Normans invaded, many scholarly terms shifted from Old English roots to Romantic ones, but in this case, ‘book’ replaced the Old French based term, ‘livret’. 

Plenty of Old English terms were replaced by other, also Germanic terms, such as ‘ened’ (related to German ‘ente’’) being replaced by ‘duck’, but in this case ‘book’ was replaced by an Old French term and then went back. What was lost was a number of compounds involving books, like ‘bochus’ (book-house) for ‘library’, a Latin based word.