When my daughters were little we were once given some tickets to a sports event.

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I wasn’t sure I wanted to take them but I did anyway. Sure enough, right there in front of their angelic little eyes two guys were hammering away at each other not 15 feet away; expressions on their faces that clearly said they wanted to kill each other.

Last night my wife was invited to another sporting spectacle. She reported that during a fight among the players the people behind her were urging the combatants to bite each other.

So, do you think this Merriam-Webster definition fits?

“Mob: a large and disorderly collection of people tending to acts of violence.”

This is a word that has done some travelling. It wasn’t until 1688 that we have a citation for a large gang of people being called a mob.

The reason they were called a mob was that it was easier to call them a mob than it had been to call them a mobile. What I’m saying here is that the word mob referring to a group of people is actually an abbreviation of the word mobile.

But the word mobile itself had only just begun to be used to refer to this horde of humanity with a first citation 12 years earlier.

What’s more, mobile too was an abbreviation.

In 1599 English adopted mobile vulgus from Latin.

Clearly this was too much of a mouthful for those who preferred to call a throng a mob.

We can clearly see the sense of movement there in the Latin phrase mobile vulgus but it wasn’t the fact that the people in the crowd were milling around or in motion that made mobile an appropriate part of their name. Instead the sense was that the mood of the crowd could change rapidly; the word fickle is used in the definitions.

It was the second part of mobile vulgus that held the sense of a crowd, so in effect the word mob inherits it’s meaning from the word vulgus.

And what does vulgus mean exactly?

The OED definition shows its authorship; it says

“Latin; the common people; the ordinary ruck.”

Somehow that says to me that it was written by a man who grew up during the reign of Queen Victoria and has views on class and privilege.