2707: Singular Words People Thought Were Plural May 19, 2024

Plenty of singular words ends in -s (e.g. ‘lens’), and even more end in -se (e.g. ‘house’), but in a few cases, this was assured to be plural. For instance, the word ‘pea’ used to be written out as ‘pease’ the plural of which was ‘peasen’, from Old English ‘pisa’, ultimately from Ancient Greek πίσον (píson). This changed in Modern English, joined by ‘cherry’, the root of which is “cherise”, though this had changed earlier, already “cherry” in Middle English. Of course, the opposite happens too wherein a plural word is assumed to be singular. This is typical especially of foreign words with plural forms other than -s, like ‘cannoli’ (singular ‘cannolo’) or ‘bacteria’ (singular ‘bacterium’), or ‘caper’ losing its perceived plural ‘-S’ from the French ‘câpres’.

2385: Behind, Beside, & Before Jun 29, 2021

English has the words 'behind' and 'beside' and 'before', with the Old English 'bi-' (be-) indicating proximity—hence the derivative word 'by'—and yet there are still some disputes whether 'behind' and its earlier forms even existed before 'hind', or whether 'hind' was actually developed by backformation. However, there are a number of cognate words like the Old Norse hindr (Old English 'hinder') meaning 'obstacle; opposition', and the Latin 'contra' ('against') which do relate to physiological proximity. Other Germanic cognates to 'hind' have a meaning of something being distant and a few too do also mean 'at the back', but also 'at the side'. The evidence in fact is not as definitive as one might want necessarily.

626: Backformation Aug 25, 2016

Plenty of words have no logical antonym: a topic that has been covered several times on this blog. When a word does not follow a pattern, usually reassuring affixation, it is possible to create words. The '-er' suffix, for example, can be used to indicate agency, among other things, but the word 'buttle' was made through backformation from 'butler'. Additionally, the prefix, 'dis-' usually has a positive form, but in the case of 'disgruntle', 'gruntle' was only created humorously in the 1920's.