I wondered why the word makeshift means what it means to us.

Here is a common word made up of two other common words and seems to have no relationship at all to either of the words it’s made up of.

I looked at news reports to see how other people were using the word makeshift and I saw references to a sports team with a makeshift lineup and a poorly run makeshift animal shelter. One dictionary gave an example of a makeshift bed created by arranging a few chairs.

So something that is makeshift is something you make do with because the proper arrangement isn’t available.

The first citation for makeshift as a word is from the 1550s.  At that time a makeshift was a person, someone who—as the Oxford English Dictionary so helpfully puts it—”makes shifts.”

That definition is now considered obsolete but by the 1800s the meaning is given as “that with which one makes shifts.”

On the face of it this seems to me to be a definition that is just as hard to understand as “a person who makes shifts.”

The key here is the etymology of the word shift.

The first meaning I think of when I hear the word shift is “movement.”  I shift the piles of papers from one part of my office to another.

But people work shifts and it’s easy to see how shift can not only mean “movement” but also “change.” I change the place of the papers in my office, and the group of people working changes with every shift.

But this meaning of “change” evolved out of an earlier meaning of the word shift that was “arrange.”

Similarly I can rearrange my office papers by shifting them and the shift work is done by a different arrangement of personnel during every time period.

This “arrangement” meaning fits in perfectly with where I started because it is how we arrange the chairs that makes for a makeshift bed. And if I substitute the word arrange in where shift was in those OED definitions they suddenly make more sense. In the 1550s a makeshift was a person who “made arrangements.” By the 1800s a makeshift was “that with which one makes arrangements.”

When you don’t have the players on your team that you’d hoped, you make arrangements with those you do have.