In your bathroom or kitchen the pipes connected to the sink and toilet and dishwasher are called plumbing, and the people who work on these pieces of infrastructure are called plumbers because at one time pipes were made of lead.

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The Latin word for “lead” is plumbum.

In days of old though, plumbers were employed in other tasks than running pipe.

Around the time of Chaucer when the word plumber first appeared in French and then within 100 years in English, a plumber was a person who worked with lead for many purposes.

Because lead was quite malleable and has a low melting temperature it was used fairly extensively to seal leaks and fill gaps. Plumbers worked on roofs and windows as well as with lead pipes.

Because lead is really heavy it has also been used for its  weight.  Workers use a plumb bob to be sure the wallpaper they are hanging is straight or that the brickwork they are building doesn’t lean this way or that as it rises. The weight called the plumb bob is so called because it was so often made of lead.

A line properly established using plumb bob is absolutely straight. This leant the word plumb a meaning of “absolute” so someone who is plumb crazy is absolutely crazy.

Before the days of sonar if you needed to find out how deep the water was as you navigated a ship you plumbed the depths; again the weight was likely to be made of lead giving the action its name.

If you drop one of these weights it will plummet to the ground. The word plummet is a word also related to the weight of lead and its tendency to fall hard.