Lord, lady, doughnut

As we shall see, the words lord, lady and loaf are intimately related through the word hlāf, which originally meant “bread” and was related to Gothic hlaifs and Old Norse hleifr. In Middle English (ME) it evolved into lof, the initial cluster /xl/ becoming /l/ and the vocalic sound becoming first /ɔ:/ and later the diphthong /əu/,as loaf shows. No Indo-European (IE) etymology is given in the Indo-European Roots Index, which says that the root *HL- is found only in Germanic (Gmc) languages.

The original OE form of lord was hlāford (fromhlāfweard = hlāf “bread” + weard “keeper, guardian”, so that lord literally meant “the keeper or guardian of the bread”. The first noun in this compound, weard, can be traced back to the IE root *WER-, which meant “to perceive, watch out for” (Indo-European Roots Index of The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. www.bartleby.com/61/. [12/11/08]). Certainly, the lord was the one supposed to care about and sustain his household. The counterpart of this word is lady, from OE form hlfādige. This is also a compound made up of hlāf “bread” and dige “kneader”. The second part of the compound derives from dæge, which in turn came from the Germanic (Gmc) *-dig. The reconstructed IE root is *DEIGH-, which, according to the Indo-European Roots Index, meant “to form, build”. Hence, lady literally meant “the kneader or maker of the bread”.

But what does doughnut have to do with lord and lady? Doughnut is certainly a recent creation, which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, was coined circa 1809 to refer to "a small cake in the shape of a ring." What is surprising is that the same IE root -*DEIGH that we found in hlfādige (now lady) is also found in dough. Dough comes from OE dāg through ME dogh in ME. It originally meant (and still means) “a mixture of flour, water, etc. that is made into bread and pastry” (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary - OALD). We have also traced back the origin of nut, which presented the form hnut(u) in OE and nute in ME. However, we have attested that it has always made reference to some kind of hard-shelled fruit (see peanut, hazelnut, and cashewnut) and so it does not make much sense to apply this meaning in the word doughnut. All I can think of to account for this is that this nuance of “hardness” might have been lost in the course of time, so that speakers might be analyzing nut as a mere suffix to express some kind of food.

As for the meaning of lord, it is obvious that the reference to bread is no longer recognisable. Lord now refers to "a man of high rank in the nobility" (OALD - semantic extension). This change of meaning has been largely influenced by the adoption of the word as the English counterpart for Latin dominus. In the case of lady, it was especially influenced by the French dame, so that it has come to refer to "a highly polite and courteous woman" (alteration of contexts). Finally, loaf is a clear example of semantic reduction, since it now refers to "a shaped mass of bread baked in one piece" (American Heritage Dictionary).

Other words containing the IE root -*WER are wary, reward, guard and panorama (pan + Greek horāma “sight”, from the verb horān “to see”, which goes back to our IE root). Words surviving from the IE root *DEIGH- include dairy and paradise (its original meaning was “an enclosured park”: pairi “around (*-PER) and daēzō (“wall”, evolving from *deigh-).