Language Of Confusion: Toys

Toy itself showed up in the fourteenth century, but back then it meant “amorous playing” (yikes) or sport, then meaning a piece of fun/entertainment until the sixteenth century, which morphed into a thing of little value and finally a thing a child plays with. It’s origin before that is unknown, and one theory is it’s a combination of more than one word. Not that anyone has any idea what those words might be.
 
Next, game showed up in the thirteenth century as a game, then hunting or fisher in the fourteenth century. It’s from the Old English gamenian, to joke or play. It’s Germanic in origin, from the Proto Germanic ga- prefix with the suffix mann meaning person. Gamy is from here, though it didn’t show up until 1844 meaning “spirited or plucky”. It didn’t have to do with taste until almost twenty years later in 1863, and who knows what brought on that weird change?
 
Doll is an interesting one since it actually showed up as a nickname before it was a toy. It showed up in the mid sixteenth century from the name Dorothy, slightly before dolly was used the same way. By the early seventeenth, it started to be used as a pet name for a woman you were involved with, and then by the middle of the century it meant… well, slut. Yeah. Then, by the seventeenth century, it meant a child’s toy baby, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was being used for women again in a fond way. Then by the mid twentieth century it was back to being patronizing again.
 
Finally today, puppet showed up in the mid sixteenth century meaning a little figure moved by strings. It comes from the Middle English popet, their word for doll because they didn’t use doll that way, from the Old French popette, from popee, a doll or puppet. That’s from the Vulgar Latin puppa, from the classical Latin pupa, which means doll or girl. Fun fact, that’s from pupillus, which is the origin word for pupil.
 
Have you finished your holiday shopping yet?
 
Sources
Online Etymology Dictionary
Google Translate
Omniglot
University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center
University of Texas at Arlington
Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English
Old English-English Dictionary
Dictionary of Medieval Latin
Encyclopaedia Britannica