Etymological study

Hi everybody!

I just remembered we forgot to bring up in class the etymological study of the words 'holy', 'holiday' and 'Halloween'. It so happens that I was already familiar with those terms because, as you know, I quite like Harry Potter, and the seventh (and final) book of the series is titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This title was really controversial because the word 'hallows' is not used nowadays, and therefore we all had to hurry up and take a look at an etymological dictionary. By the way, 'hallows' was finally paralleled with 'holy relics', just so you know (not everyone, but some of you may be interested).
In any case, I found out that the three words ('holy', 'holiday' and 'Halloween') have an Old Norse origin 'heilagr'. In OE it changed into 'halig' ('that must be preserved intact') which in fact, after some variations in meaning towards the spiritual field, became 'holy' in ModE.
Now, 'holiday' is a compound of 'halig' ('holy') + 'daeg' ('day') and it was first registered in the 14th century (meaning 'religious festival' or 'day of recreation'). By the 16th century both its pronunciation and sense evolved towards the current word 'holiday'.
The word 'halloween' is really interesting when it comes to its provenance. It appeared as a Scottish shortening of 'Allhallow-even' (literally 'Eve of All Saints') which was celebrated on the 31st of October, the last day of the Celtic calendar.

So, I hope you enjoyed these curious facts. I certainly did! I know it's not much, but it is really interesting to see how words and their meaning change as much as going, for example, from 'religious festival' to those exquisite long months in which we rest and have fun!

Cheers!
Marina Torralbo

PS. I used an online etymology dictionary. You can check it out in the following link: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php