2965: Pipedream and Pipedream: Completely Different Feb 2, 2025
The modern sense of ‘pipedream’, as in a far-fetched scheme, is from the 19th century in reference to the experience of smoking opium from a pipe, and having hallucinations or other dreamlike undergoings. This was further reinforced by a more modern understanding of ‘dream’ as ‘aspiration’ too, which was only attested from the early 20th century.
An Old English word, pīpdrēam existed, but with a completely different meaning: pipe music. ‘Pipe’ originally meant ‘chirp’ before it referred to the tool to make such a noise, and hence any other sort of tube, but that’s not even the greatest divergence here. ‘Dream’ (drēam) had the meaning of ‘music’ but also ‘joy’, and, rather similar to the formation of ‘hallucinate’, came from an earlier root meaning ‘deceive’ or ‘damage’. Indeed, the older root of deception would be a clearer root for the modern sense, but that sense is not attested in the Old English ‘drēam’.
It is not entirely certain that ‘drēam’ is the source of ‘dream’ from direct available evidence, but ‘dream’ is cognate with all other Germanic words for such slumber-visions like German ‘Traum’ or Danish and Norwegian ‘drøm’. Given that there is clearly an old, shared root among Germanic languages, and yet no evidence as such, the only tenable options are:
The word was used for ‘music / joy’ in several historical varieties of languages that all later took on a meaning of ‘dream’, each dropping the older meaning.
The second meaning was used at the time, but not recorded, and the sense of ‘music’ was simply dropped over time.
There are two completely different etymologies.
Given the lack of recording of it having the modern sense, option 1 is more likely than option 3, but each explanation has its problems.