I have been prowling around the vastness of the internet in search of the word origin for evening.
My presumption has been that evening was named after our lovely sister Eve.
No such luck.
The word eveing was coined in c. 1440 and it originally looked like this:
cwildtid
Go figure.
The darn word doesn't even LOOK like evening!
And, of course, our Biblical Eve gets no credit for this lovely word... evening.
I have to do some more digging about.
In the meantime, if you do have an interest in word origins (entymology) please stop by here:
Online Etymology Dictionary
Thursday, March 16, 2006
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1 comment:
This was posted as a comment by Dolda. I am grateful for the information. The original comment didn't post. Clearly, this post is quite old, but it can't hurt providing some information in case someone else stumbles upon it.
Both the words "evening" and "eve" come from the now archaic word "even", which is older and seems to have obscure origins in common Germanic, and has variants in e.g. German ("Abend") and Scandinavian languages ("afton" in Swedish). Its ultimate origin seems to be obscure (but certainly pre-Christian).
The name "Eve", on the other hand, comes originally from Hebrew via Latin, and so is completely unrelated.
The word "cwildtid" you cite as the origin of "evening", on the third hand, is in fact a completely different word for evening, which has since fallen out of use from English, having been replaced by "evening". It is still used in some other Germanic languages, however (e.g. "kväll" in Swedish). It can be traced back to the common Indo-European language and also has descendants in e.g. Lithuanian, where it means something akin to "end", so its original usage in Germanic presumably meant something like the "end time (of the day)".
All three words are, ultimately, entirely unrelated to each other.
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