Halloween. If you’re from North America, you likely grew up with this spooky “holiday” lurking at the end of October, ever-present in your childhood, like some ancestral curse which flares up yearly along with the changing of the leaves to a sickly hue of yellow.
If you’re from elsewhere in the world, your experience of Halloween in recent years may have resembled that of a witness to a strange and outlandish invasion, whose garish black and orange plastic paraphernalia have spread like a stain, consuming more and more aisles in your local shop year after year.
Or perhaps you live in one of the lands whose ancient customs were stitched together to give life to the monster that we call Halloween today.
The origins and gradual creeping spread of this holiday, and of its strange customs, are a matter of interest for folklorists and anthropologists. For the linguist, however, what captivates our attention more than anything is the name itself, whether you spell it with or without an apostrophe:
Halloween.
You may have heard that this name is some sort of unholy shortening of the phrase All Hallows’ Eve, which is true, but it only pushes the mystery back further into the mists of the linguistic past, tempting us to ask the question: what, pray tell, is a Hallow?
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The undeathly hallows
Fear not: a hallow is no cause for alarm! Quite the opposite, actually. A hallow is nothing but a saint.
In Old English, the word was hālga, literally ‘holy one.’ It’s a definite form of the adjective hālig, which gives us Modern English holy.
But it’s hard to recognize the connection, because the two words holy and hallow sound so different in Modern English. This difference is all because of the little vowel -i-, which was there in the middle of hāliġ, but which dropped out in the form hālga. In Old English, hālga is a definite form, used in phrases meaning ‘the holy (whatever)’ rather than ‘a holy (whatever).’
The loss of that i had ripple effects, in the first place because the Old English g-sound sounded different in different contexts: at the end of a word after an i, it sounded like a y. This is notated by kind editors of Old English texts by putting a little dot above the g, like so: hāliġ.
But in a word like hālga, where the g comes between a consonant like l and a vowel like a, the g made a gh-sound, similar to the sound made at the end of the exclamation ugh. Here’s what the two words sounded like in Old English:
The y-sound of the suffix -iġ eventually dropped out, leaving just the vowel i, which we ended up spelling -y, giving us the modern form holy.
But in hālga, things took a different course. The gh-sound made by the g in hālga stuck around long enough to be spelled with a special letter in the later Middle Ages, the yogh.
So much for the difference at the end of the words holy and hallow. But what about the difference in the vowel in holy and hallow?
Both words had the same vowel in Old English, a long ā vowel. Of the two Modern English words, holy actually has the vowel we’d expect it to have. The Great Vowel Shift turned the long ā vowel of Old and Middle English into an o vowel in Modern English, just like stān became stone and hām became home.
It’s actually the word hallow that has the unexpected vowel a (as in hat). This is, in fact, exactly the vowel we would expect to come from an Old English short — rather than long — a, as happened in words like Old English mann ‘person,’ which became Modern English man.
The reason the vowel in hālga was eventually shortened is wrapped up in a more general phenomenon in the history of English, where long vowels were shortened before certain clusters of two consonants: l + g was one of them.
And there were many others, which is why we have differences in the vowel sounds of certain related words, such as five (from a long ī) alongside fifth (from a short i); or heal (from a long vowel spelled ǣ) alongside health (from its short counterpart, æ).
The word hallow meaning ‘saint’ fell out of use after 1500, and was preserved only in the phrase All Hallows’, referring to the festival celebrated by the Christian Church on November 1, also known as All Saints Day.
This is also where the verb hallow ‘to make holy’ comes from, heard in phrases like hallowed ground or hallowed be thy name, from the Lord’s Prayer.
And, because I know some of you have been waiting for this: the word hallow was also used in the plural, as hallows, to refer to the relics of saints or to the shrines where those relics are held. This is the meaning that J. K. Rowling made use of in the title of the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — incidentally, a title composed entirely of elements found in Old English!1
Pease porridge in the pot nine days old: now that’s a horror story
The -een component in Halloween comes from the word even, which sounds like a short form of evening. In fact, evening is a long form of even: in Old English, the word for ‘evening’ was ǣfen.
If you’re wondering where eve (as in All Hallows’ Eve or Christmas Eve) comes from, it’s part of a general loss of the -en ending which occurred to several nouns in Middle English: in some cases this created doublets, that is, pairs of words which exist with and without the -en ending: eve and even(ing), morn and morrow, maiden and maid. In some nouns, we only retain the -en-less form: for example, the word game descends from gamen in Old English.
This probably happened because -en was a formerly common plural ending (which we still see in oxen), and the words whose singular forms ended in -en may have started to sound a bit plural, so the -en got chopped off.
This same thing happened later with the words pease (as in pease porridge hot) and cherise, both of which got borrowed into English from French with plural-sounding singular words (ending in -se), so the -se got chopped off to create pea and cherry. This phenomenon is called morphological reanalysis.
The word morn was originally morgen, where the g in between the r and the -en ending made that same gh-sound we saw earlier in hālga. But, over time, morgen shortened to be pronounced as a single syllable, and this gh-sound disappeared in the process, as it was strangled by the two consonants on either side of it.
But in the form where the -en dropped off, the gh-sound survived. Eventually, gh-sounds at the end of words (well, some of them at least; this is a story for another day) became an o-sound, just as it did in hallow from hālga. Other examples of this are burg becoming borough and sorg becoming sorrow.
Our modern word evening (from Old English ǣfenung) is formed from an old verb to even (Old English ǣfenian), meaning ‘to become evening.’ Evening is just a regular -ing noun formed from a verb, like fighting comes from fight. So, when you think about it, evening means ‘evening-ing.’
The name for morning, ‘becoming morn’, is also formed in this way, coming from a verb to morn, meaning ‘to become morning.’
Dawn has a similar story: it corresponds to an Old English word dagung, literally meaning ‘day-ing.’ There, the Old English gh-sound, spelled by -g-, turned into a w. But there’s some strange stuff going on in the history of dawn, because the Old English word dagung should have given us dawing (which actually did occur until the 16th century, and even later in Scots).
The existence of the n in dawn is hard to explain: it may have crept into the word from a reinterpretation of the Middle English verb dawen ‘to become day’, where the -en was the infinitive ending, corresponding to the to in Modern English to be, to do, to see, etc., and still found as the infinitive ending in Modern German.
Since dawen was such a short verb, people may have reinterpreted the ending -en as part of the verb root itself — this is basically the opposite of what happened with pease and cherise!
It’s also possible that the -n- crept in thanks to Norse influence, since formations in -ning are common in Old Norse. The modern Scandinavian languages all have forms like dagning, which correspond to Modern English dawning.
The vanishing v
With the mystery of the names for the parts of the day solved — at least as much as we’re likely to solve them, we turn our attention to the case of the vanishing v in -een.
What happened to the v to turn even into -een?
This deletion of v after a stressed vowel is a sound change that occurred sporadically throughout the history of English. It produced variant forms o’er and e’er for over and ever, now used mainly in poetry (for their quality of being just one syllable long — easier to fit into iambic pentameter).
Scots was particularly fond of this change, producing deil corresponding to Modern English devil and Scots gie, which corresponds to Modern English give.
But the loss of -v- occurred in some Modern English words, too. The word head descends from Old English hēafod — Old English spelled the v-sound as f between vowels. So too does lord descend from Old English hlāford and lady from Old English hlǣfdīġe. These words, too, have very interesting stories (involving bread, believe it or not), but I’ll save those for another day.
It’s all too tempting to continue, but, as you can see, explaining the etymology of the single word Halloween is like wandering into a twisted (and very likely haunted) labyrinth of interconnected rooms.
It’s easy enough to take your first step in, but with each door you open, you’re presented with three more, and before you know it, you’ve lost your way in a maze of morphological reanalysis, pursued by a pack of wild yoghs.
As you page frantically through etymological dictionaries written by forgotten linguists, in that very moment, you’re in the gravest of dangers. For you too may, in a moment of weakness, succumb to the madness and devote your life to the study of language.
Scary stuff. Happy Halloween!
For the record, translated literally, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows would be something like Hāmrīċ Pottere and þā Dēaðlīcan Hālgan. In Old English this would mean ‘Harry Potter and the Mortal Saints.’ Another note: Hāmrīċ ‘home-ruler’ is the Old English version of the Frankish name that would eventually become Henry, whose nickname form became Harry, although I don’t believe the name Hāmrīċ itself is attested in Old English.
Lovely article.
But I'm disappointed that the origin of 'evening' is unrelated to evening in the sense of 'becoming even'. Because that would be a charming way to describe the period of the day when light fades and colour drains away.
Ho hum I shall face the truth bravely and move on.
Thanks Colin for this great read.
After reading this I am tempted to start a gothic-tinged band called "þā Dēaðlīcan Hālgan"
Oh, and the cemetery painting is a masterpiece.