Apparently I’ve never done this
before. Time to rectify that.
Spring
You know how sometimes two words
that are spelled the same but have nothing in common turn out to be from
different sources? Yeah, well, this is not one of those times. Spring the
season, which first showed up in the fifteenth century,
is from the verb to spring, like something that would spring up. Before it was
spring, it was just called Lent (lencten in Old English), and in the
fourteenth century they started calling it “springing time”, when plants would “spring”
from the ground. Although really, it doesn’t seem like they do much springing…
Anyway, all versions of spring come from the Old English springan, spring or jump,
which is from the Proto
Germanic sprengan and Proto Indo European sprengh-, from spergh-, to move, hasten or spring.
Summer
Summer comes from the Old English sumor, which is just
summer. It can be traced back through the
Proto Germanic sumra- and Proto Indo
European sem-, which also just means
summer. So this one stayed pretty consistent through the years.
Fall/Autumn
Ah, the season with two names. Which
one do you use? Autumn showed up in the late fourteenth century as autumpne, from the Old French
autumpne/automne and classical Latin autumnus, which is also autumn.
Fall is much like spring, in that it came from what the plants seem to do. It
appeared as another word for the season in the mid seventeenth century,
a shortening of “fall of the leaf”. Because leaves fall, we call autumn fall.
Winter
Winter comes from the Old English winter, which means…
winter. Not much change there. It’s from
the Proto Germanic wintruz and is
thought to mean literally “the wet season”. The Proto Indo European word for
water/wet is wed-/wend-, the source
for pretty much everything related to water.
I guess snow is wet. I mostly try to avoid it.
Sources
Tony Jebson’s
page on the Origins of
Old English
