In his much-loved classic novel Ivanhoe, the author Sir Walter Scott coined the word “freelance” way back in 1819. He initially used it not to describe a writer or creator who works for multiple publications, but a literal lance-carrying medieval mercenary knight who would gladly fight any courtly cause that paid him. It was this notion of working for cash, regardless of the work involved, that eventually led to Scott’s “free lance” becoming attached to jobbing workers and writers when the word slipped into more widespread use in the later 19th century. 

As much as Scott’s word might harken back to the days of medieval knights in shining armor, it certainly doesn’t date back that far. But that’s not to say that there aren’t more than a few hangovers from medieval times in our everyday vocabulary that have endured in our language for centuries.  

Let’s examine 10 Medieval words we use every day.

TENANT

Related to the French verb tenir, meaning to hold, the word tenant dates all the way back to the 13th century in English, when it was originally used of a legal landholder. The earliest reference to a tenant leasing land or a home from an overseeing landlord dates from 1377.

FORAY

When you take an inquisitive foray into something, you’re using a verb rooted in medieval Scots, the origins of which can be traced even further back to the same French root that gave us forage. When it first emerged in the language in the 1400s, a foray was originally a hostile incursion into unfamiliar or enemy territory, and it remained in use in that sense until the 1600s when it dwindled out of use. Two centuries later, the word was resurrected and pulled out of historical obscurity by Walter Scott in 1813, this time in the somewhat weaker sense that it retained today, meaning a brief trip or venture.

NEVERTHELESS

Although we’re more used to the word never meaning “on no occasion,” in medieval English never could also be used to imply some sense of “to no extent,” or “under no condition”—the same sense in which it remains in use today in stock expressions like never the wiser or never the better. Another of these stock expressions was never the less, which was apparently utilized sufficiently frequently in medieval times to eventually emerge as a single word, nevertheless, in the late 1300s.

UTMOST

The “ut” in utmost is actually the Old English equivalent of what is now the word out in Modern English, which makes both utmost and outmost (or outermost) essentially synonymous with one another. When the word first emerged in the language in the mid Old English period (the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest record comes from the famous Lindisfarne Gospels, written around AD 700), utmost was only ever used in this more literal meaning; the more general use of the word to mean extreme or to the greatest degree (as in “the utmost possibility”) emerged somewhat later, in the early 1300s.

STEW

A number of words for stock foods or dishes first emerged in the medieval period, including broth, pottage, and stew. Originally, however, back in the 14th century, a stew was not a casserole-like meal of slow-cooked meat or vegetables, but the name of a kind of pot in which such a meal might be prepared; in that sense, it is related to an even earlier French word meaning to bathe. The use of stew to refer to a casserole was a later development, dating from the 1700s.

ACRE

Acre derives from an ancient Germanic word literally meaning a field or area of open land suitable for tilling or plowing. It became a standard unit of area toward the end of the Old English period, when it was more strictly defined as the amount of land that could be plowed by a yoke of oxen in a single day—an area later quantified even more precisely as 220 yards by 22 yards, or 4,840 sq yards in total.

PATIENT

As an adjective, patient arrived in English from French in the 1300s, but can be traced back even further in time to a Latin word meaning endurance or suffering. The noun patient, meaning a person quite literally “patiently” undergoing medical care, arrived around the same time and derives from the same source.

TRESPASS

Much of the modern legal system (and much of its vocabulary) was set down and outlined in medieval England in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest of 1066. As a result, a number of words for crimes and criminals are all hangovers from the medieval period, including trespass, treason, arson, theft, robbery, murder, fraud and even counterfeit.

AWKWARD

Awkward is one of a number of words that were apparently introduced to medieval England by the Vikings, and adopted into English from the Viking language of Old Norse; etymologically, the first element in awkward is a Norse word, afugr, literally meaning “turned around” or “in the wrong direction,” to which has been added the same English-origin suffix as found in words like backward and upward.

TOMORROW

Tomorrow is actually a running-together of the Old English phrase to morgenne, which literally meant “on the morrow” (i.e., the day after today). Originally spelled as two separate words, or linked with a hyphen, the single-word spelling we tend to use today emerged in the 1400s. Although the older divided spelling survived in some contexts until the 19th century, the single-word spelling eventually triumphed, leaving the word as we have it today.

More About Medieval Times: