“Boy” is a weird word

From baby talk to term of abuse

The Poet Vinje as a Shepherd Boy (1887), Christian Skredsvig

Horn plants his feet on the moss-slicked cobbles of the bridge, his gaze fixed on the gate before him. The gate is banded in iron. Solid.

The man standing before it is less so. He’s stout, with a paunch that strains the leather of his jerkin and a face set in the permanent sneer of minor authority.

Beyond the gatekeeper and the gate, beyond the stone walls, his beautiful Rymenhild awaits him, promised after seven long years.

“I seek entry, sir,” Horn says, his voice steady, betraying none of the weariness from his long journey.

The gatekeeper shifts his weight, planting a grubby hand on the hilt of a short sword at his belt. He looks Horn up and down, taking in the travel-stained cloak, the worn boots, the dirt on his face. His sneer deepens. “Go back the way you came.”

He punctuates the command by spitting on the ground, the gob landing just shy of Horn’s boot.

Horn does not move. He expected some resistance. He’s come, after all, in the clothes of a poor pilgrim. But the ruse is necessary: the king was expecting Horn to charge in on his steed and stop the wedding.

“Please, sir,” Horn tries again, “I’m but a poor beggar, seeking alms—”

“Alms, is it?” the man scoffs, his voice loud and crude. “There’s a change! Alms, indeed. Everyone has a sad story, don’t they? I’ve heard them all. Now, be on your way before I have you thrown in a cell for loitering.”

A cold calm settles over Horn. He has faced down armies, sailed through tempests, and survived the plots of treacherous men. He will not be turned away now by this servant, this churl, this… boy. The word flashes through his mind, a perfect expression for his contempt.

“I will ask one last time, sir,” Horn says, his voice now low. “Allow me to pass.”

The gatekeeper mistakes the quiet tone for weakness. He takes a lumbering step forward, reaching out to shove the beggar back.

It’s a miscalculation.

In a motion too quick for the eye to follow, Horn sidesteps the clumsy push. He grabs the man’s outstretched arm, twisting it sharply. The gatekeeper cries out. Horn uses the man’s own momentum against him and twirls him around.

For a second, the gatekeeper teeters over the side of the bridge. Horn kicks him in the backside. Then he is gone.

Horn strides into the castle. That wasn’t as subtle as it might have been. But oh boy, the boy sure had it coming.

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You're reading The Dead Language Society. I'm Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

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This Saturday, we’ll be exploring Old English dialects, in particular, which Old English dialect(s) gave rise to Modern English. Hint: it wasn’t the Old English you learn in a textbook!

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From servant to son

A Footman Sleeping (1871), Charles Bargue

The first time the word boy appears in the written record of the English language was late: around the year 1300.

In its earliest uses, boy referred not to a young male but specifically to a servant. In fact, the word boy often had a rather contemptuous tone, as you may have gleaned from the vignette above.

In fact, that vignette dramatizes the very first appearance of the word boy in the English language. It’s from an episode in the Middle English romance King Horn.

Here’s the original:

He com to þe gateward
þat him answerede hard
…
þe boye hit scholde abugge;
Horn þreu him ouer þe brigge.

‘He came to the gatekeeper,
who gave him the answer no,
…
the bastard would pay for it;
Horn threw him over the bridge.’ (King Horn 1077–1078; 1084–1085)

The vast majority of the uses of boy in Middle English (1100–1450) refer to servants, slaves, or common people, usually, but not always, with contempt; or otherwise appear as an insulting term of address.

On a few occasions, however, we see something like the modern use starting to emerge, especially in the 15th century. For example, in a collection of medical recipes dated around 1450, we see a clear use of boy to mean a (very) young male:

For to know wethyr a woman be with chyld, a boye or a wenche.

‘To know whether a woman is with child, a boy or a girl.’ (John of Burgundy’s Practica Phisicalia)

Even today, the word boy has never truly lost its meaning of ‘servant’ or, more generously, ‘hired help’ (for example, in the compound pool boy, bell boy, or errand boy). Nor has it entirely fallen out of use as a contemptuous form of address in certain contexts. But the primary meaning of boy is now unambiguously a ‘young male.’

This pathway of evolution, where a word meaning ‘servant’ comes to mean ‘young man’ — or vice versa — is common across languages. I’ll discuss some examples from other languages later on, but we can also see it at work in the earlier history of the English language in the words that boy replaced: knave and knight.

These words, which have had rather different fates, both originated in Old English words meaning either ‘boy’ or ‘servant’: cnapa or cnafa (which became knave) could mean ‘young man’ or ‘servant’ in Old English, but is now exclusively a term of reproach.¹

The Old English cniht, on the other hand, had the same meaning as cnapa: ‘boy’ or ‘servant’ but became specialized to mean ‘military servant,’ which ended up being a relatively high rank in society.

So, while you’d rather be a knight than a knave in English today, in Anglo-Saxon times, the two would have been synonyms.

In that context, the evolution of boy from a word meaning ‘servant’ to ‘young male’ is not surprising. But the real mystery of the word boy is not its later development, but its ultimate origin.

It popped up in English in the Middle Ages seemingly out of nowhere, and to this day, no one knows for sure where it came from.

That’s not to say there aren’t theories…

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The embuiés are back in town

Three Armed Riders Escorting Prisoners Near Reims (1825), Peter von Hess

There are three main ideas about where boy comes from. The first two mirror the two big sources of English vocabulary: some scholars think boy is a French import which came over with William the Conqueror and friends; others believe boy is a native Old English word, inherited from its Germanic forebears. The final major theory is that boy comes from baby talk. As we’ll see, these theories aren’t entirely mutually exclusive.

The French theory takes as its point of departure the curious shape of the word. The oy sequence — this diphthong (a combination of two vowel sounds, in this case o + i), is a very un-English sound.

There don’t appear to have been any Old English words containing this dipthong, and most of the Modern English words with this oy diphthong (also spelled oi) originate from French: joy, annoy, coin, loin, join, boil, soil, royal, loyal are all of French origin.²

In a 1940 article,³ the philologist E. J. Dobson reviewed evidence from rhymes and other historical writing about English pronunciation, and concluded that boy had variant pronunciations in historical periods⁴ which were only found in words from a particular French diphthong, the one which is spelled in standard Modern French UI.

But here’s the trick: in Norman French, the kind brought over to England, this diphthong was often pronounced oi, with a similar sound to the one that boy has today.

So Dobson went looking for French words with a sequence like bui inside them and found a verb embuier ‘to fetter.’

He hypothesized that there may have been a word like un embuié, which meant a person chained up. In fact, a noun like embuié does occur in an Anglo-Norman text, that is, a French-language text written in England:

Li Sire desliet les embuiez
‘The Lord looses the prisoners‘ (c. 1145, Oxford Psalter; Psalms 145:7)⁵

A word meaning ‘person in chains’ is certainly a plausible source for a noun that means ‘slave’ or ‘servant.’

This theory has to contend with the loss of em- from the start of the word and -é from the end, but neither of these changes are unheard of in the extensive history of the adaptation of French words into English.⁶

The Germanic theory starts from the fact that there are words almost identical to boy in the continental Germanic languages most closely related to English, that is, the Frisian languages, spoken on the North Sea coast of Germany and the Netherlands. West Frisian, for example, has the form boi ‘boy,’ which is hard to ignore.

To back up this theory, we actually do have an attested name Boia in Old English, and similar, later forms in place names. The trouble is that Boia doesn’t look like an Old English word at all, a fact which the French theory takes advantage of.

Old English does not have oi sequences in its inherited vocabulary, since there’s no way for the sound changes that gave rise to Old English to produce such a sequence. But if the name Boia is a nickname formed in Old English from an existing root (or one imported from Frisia), this objection falls apart.⁷

This would also explain why the form boy took so long to show up: if boy was indeed a casual nickname, it wasn’t the kind of word suitable for high-minded literature or official documents, which is the vast majority of what was written down in the days before printing.

But this nickname theory just pushes back the mystery, because nicknames like Boia are typically based on an existing word. That would imply a root like Old English *bo- (the asterisk is there to remind us that this form isn’t actually attested anywhere). But what could *bo- mean?

This brings us to our third theory, which is based on an interesting observation of a wide range of languages.

Words for ‘boy’ or ‘child’ often begin with b- or p-, for example Latin puer, Swedish pojke, German Bube, Greek paîs ‘child.’ Even English baby falls into this category.

One of the first types of sounds a child learns to make are the bilabials, those sounds made with the lips. This is why words like mama and papa/baba are among the first words a child produces, and as a result, it’s no accident that words for ‘mother’ and ‘father’ all over the world sound like this. So perhaps there’s a similar pressure for words for babies or boys to involve b- or p- in the root.

The trouble with this theory is that it fails to take into account what we know about the specific histories of all of these ‘boy’ or ‘child’ words.

Some of these b-/p- words are etymologically related to roots we can reconstruct (puer and paîs), others are loanwords (Swedish pojke is likely originally from Finnish), while still others are mysterious, such as Bube and babe. A general ‘baby talk’ theory is a bit too broad to help us understand what happened.

But what if the specific root *bo- were baby talk? The linguist Anatoly Liberman⁸ mentions a very old idea that the root *bo-, was a baby talk form of another word brother.⁹

Baby talk often simplifies clusters of consonants like the br- at the beginning of brother, so *bo- is exactly what we’d expect to come out of a baby talk version of brother.

On this theory, German Bube ‘boy’ and English baby would derive from this root as well, just with reduplication (saying the root twice, like *bo-bo) rather than a nickname suffix. And that makes sense too: babies love reduplication, as in baba for bottle.

This explanation combines the Germanic theory of the origin of boy with the baby talk theory, and it seems to me like the best explanation that we have. And it’s by no means a settled question.

But this is to be expected: words meaning ‘boy’ have a habit of getting changed or replaced over time, and not just in English.

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Boys will be boys, but not for long

La Cascade; A Rocky Hillside With A Peasant Woman And Child Near A Waterfall And Boys Resting By A Blasted Tree, Hubert Robert

In fact, when you zoom out from English, you see that words meaning ‘boy’ have changed all over Europe from ancient times to the present.¹⁰

I mentioned earlier that the Latin word for boy was puer. But none of the languages descended from Latin have retained puer or a derivative word to mean ‘boy.’¹¹ In every language, puer has been replaced, and it’s been replaced very differently in different languages.

French has replaced puer with garçon, itself originally a loanword from Frankish *wrakjō ‘servant, boy,’ (sound familiar?), which is itself related to the English word wretch.

Both originally meant ‘exile, one driven out.’ Italian uses ragazzo, itself of unknown origin, but also originally meaning both ‘boy’ and ‘apprentice’. Portuguese uses garoto or menino, both of unknown origin, Spanish uses (among other things) muchacho, from a diminutive form of mozo ‘boy; servant’, which is… wait for it… itself of unknown origin!

Are you noticing a pattern here?

I’ve noticed three: words that mean ‘boy’ are especially susceptible to change, they often also mean ‘servant’ or similar, and they’re often of obscure or unknown origin.

Part of the reason for their obscure origin and frequent change is that ‘boy’ words often start out as casual or colloquial terms, and only later make their way into language fit to be written down.

As the linguist Carl Darling Buck put it, they begin their lives as “derogatory or whimsical, in part endearing” and only “finally commonplace.” Tied in with this is the fact that the role of servant was often filled by young men and, as a result, the word for their social role and their stage of life became entwined.

We may never be 100% certain where the word boy truly came from: was it a French loan, an ancient Germanic inheritance, or a bit of baby speech? Take your pick. There’s still enough mystery left over, whatever decision you make.

Just like she and dog, boy may be something you hear every day, but it’s a very weird word.

1. Knave may have originated in a term meaning ‘peg,’ which was later applied to a young man. Compare knob.

2. Others, such as toy, coil, and roil are of obscure origin.

3. Dobson, E. J. (1940). The etymology and meaning of “boy.” Medium Ævum 9(3): 121–154.

4. In fact, boy has other pronunciations to this day: one famous one is the traditional Newfoundland pronunciation of boy as b’y (pronounced like Standard English by), as in the famous folk song I’s the b’y.

5. In the Vulgate (and translations thereof), the Psalms are numbered differently. Modern Bibles will number this Psalm 146.

6. There was a Scots word boys, meaning ‘shackles, fetters’, which comes from the French word buie ‘fetter’, the root of embuier ‘to fetter’.

7. This, by the way, is the same argument we explored when discussing the etymology of the word dog.

8. Liberman, Anatoly (2000). The etymology of English boy, beacon, and buoy. American Journal of Germanic Linguistics & Literatures 12(2): 201–234. Liberman’s theory contains another element regarding a root for ‘devil’, which I won’t get into here other than to say it links the ‘child’ meaning of boy nicely to its meaning of ‘servant’ as well as its contemptuous use.

9. It’s in Julius Pokorny’s 1959 dictionary of Proto-Indo-European etymology, but goes back before that to the early 20th century. Technically, all of this discussion applies not to the Germanic or Old English forms, but to their Proto-Indo-European ancestors. It’s the same story with slightly changed consonants and vowels.

10. The same is true of words meaning ‘girl,’ but that’s a story for another day.

11. Romanian has retained a word prunc ‘baby,’ which descends from an unattested *pueruncus, which is clearly a derivative (in this case, diminutive) form of puer. But it no longer means ‘boy’ in Romanian.