The panting my dog does is because she is hot and since she doesn’t have sweat glands she has to move air over her tongue to cool off.

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When I pant it’s because I am pumping my bike up a hill or something—it’s actually something I do like to do.

When the word pant first appeared in English it meant just about what it does now, quick short breaths.  But what causes these quick breaths may have something to do with why it’s called panting.

Etymologists think our English word came from an Old French word pantiser and ultimately goes back to an ancient Greek root that also spawned our word fantasy.

There are Italian dialect words that also relate, and the point of all the historical linguistic cross-checking is that the experts think the reason our ancient forbearers were panting, is because they woke up in the night from a fantastic nightmare.

The phantom caused the panting and so somehow grew into the word that means quick short breaths.

The repetitious pattern of panting has suggested the use of this word in other applications too.  Mary Shelly, author of Frankenstein used it to describe the wind and waves on the sea.  The OED says this usage is now rare and mainly found in Newfoundland.

My brother-in-law is a Newfoundlander but he doesn’t recognize it.

The date that the word pant first appears in English seems to blow around a bit too. Almost a hundred years ago the Philological Society discussed just this issue and published its findings in their transactions.

My CD copy of the OED second edition is gives 1440 as the first appearance of pant. But the OED online has an updated entry that pushes the first appearance back 90 years.

The interesting thing is that this update does so by taking into account the 100 year old discussions of the Philological Society.

So why could information available 100 years ago make it into the online update but not into the CD? CD technology isn’t that outdated.

As I’ve mentioned before, the OED is a huge piece of work and so it takes a long time to go through the whole thing again and make sure it is current.

The original project proposal for the OED was looking at 10 years.  After 5 years, when they had made it all the way to the word ant they realized they had a project over-run on their hands.

In the end the first edition took about 40 years.

Because revising the OED is such a big deal, it doesn’t get done too often. The second edition wasn’t actually an update but an integration of lots of addendums. So until the online update the most authoritative widely recognized reference on the word pant was written in the 1890s.

The fact that the entry didn’t change all that much in the update is a testament to the rigor of the original work.

As the old saying goes, if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well; which is actually an old saying that Oxford tells me isn’t that old, at least compared to the word pant.

Pant appeared in English around 1350 while the “old saying” dates from 1746 in the letters of Philip, fourth earl of Chesterfield.