slave – podictionary 143
Mar 4th, 2010 | 
Sadly, there are still people in the world today who are living as slaves. If you want to know more about this, please visit iabolish.com or antislavery.org.
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The history of the word slave jumped out at me from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable because there it claimed that the word slave is a misnomer and that it really means “noble” and “illustrious.”
So, as I always do, I cracked open The Oxford English Dictionary.
Let me see; all the definitions that I can see tell me that ever since it came into English more than 700 years ago, the meaning of slave has remained pretty consistent.
It does say here that we get this word because so many people of Slavic origin became slaves even earlier than that.
As an aside, in northern Canada there is Great Slave Lake named after the Slavey Indians, who in turn were named because their Cree neighbors so often took them into slavery.
As I poke around in my various sources I get more of the same. The word comes to us because 1100 years ago the Holy Roman Empire was fighting with Slavic people and taking many of them prisoner.
But nothing about the word actually meaning “noble.”
Nothing at least until I get to the American Heritage Dictionary. There it indicates that Slavic was what the Slavic peoples called themselves.
Now we’re getting somewhere; one wouldn’t expect them to call themselves anything that was degrading.
I’m told that that the root comes from an Indo-European word meaning “to hear.” Thus we might consider Slavic as the name of a people who considered themselves noteworthy, people you’d have heard about.
And yet the Century Dictionary directly counters this claim saying “the ordinary derivation from Old Bulgarian slovo, a word, or slava, glory, fame, is untenable.”
