Tuesday, April 15, 2014

A-to-Z Challenge: Make

Incidentally, make is the word that prompted me to join the challenge, because it didn’t have enough to it for a regular post.


So. Make.

I have no time for when make showed up in English, just that it’s from the Old English macian, which has a variety of meanings such as make, construct, prepare, cause, behave, transform—basically all the meanings we have for make. Macian comes from the West Germanic makon, to fashion/fit, which can be traced back to the Proto Indo European mag, knead or fashion. Interestingly enough, past tense made came from the Middle English maked (which might explain how that d got there). The Old English equivalent is macod, the past participle of macian.

Halfway done!

Sources
Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English
University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

9 comments:

  1. A little bit of mystery with this one.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Huh. I don't know if this is in the etymology at all, but it also makes me this of magic and magician.

    Are we really halfway? YAY! :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. So if I say I'm "macian bacon," it's legit! :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Macian would be another good character name!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Who knew make had such a varied past? It's certainly interesting to see how the word has changed but in some cases the meaning has stayed the same.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I saw magician in macian too. I guess it could be related in that a magician makes things through magic? Yeah, that's way too logical to be true.

    It's always one letter that gets the A to Z flowing, isn't it? For me, it was this knitting project that went with X...

    ReplyDelete
  7. It's so interesting to learn the etymology of words.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hi JE - I love finding out where words originate from - always interests me and then enlightens me too .. cheers Hilary

    ReplyDelete
  9. This makes sense. We're used to buying our own clothes, but many people from long ago created their own.

    ReplyDelete

Please validate me.