And now for
quiet words, because I like things quiet.
Quiet showed up
in the fourteenth century, from the Old French
quiete and classical Latin quies, rest,
and its verb form quietare, to lull.
Further back, it’s the Proto
Indo European kweie-, to rest or
be quiet. It’s remained remarkably consistent through the millennia!
Silent showed up
in the sixteenth century, while
silence showed up much earlier, in the thirteenth century.
The former comes from the classical Latin silentem,
from the verb silere, to silence,
while silence was the Old French silence
after being the Latin silentium, and
obviously it’s also from silere. Again, very consistent.
Hush appeared in
the mid sixteenth century, a variant on
the Middle
English huisht, and is thought to
be imitative—in other words, the sound when people hush you sounds like hush,
so it became a word. Shush is the same way, except it only appeared in 1921.
Going “shhh!” to someone is older, having started in 1847,
and shush comes from that. There’s no evidence that hush had any influence on
it, but that wouldn’t surprise me.
Finally today,
mute. It showed up in the late fourteenth century from the Old French muet, which is
actually a diminutive form of mut/mo.
Before that, it was the classical Latin mutus,
which basically means speechless.
It’s possibly from another imitative word, meue-.
You might be asking how that’s initiative. Well, what sound do you make when
you can’t open your mouth?
Sources
Tony Jebson’s
page on the Origins of
Old English
