From 2006

The other day on the blog The Oxford Etymologist Anatoly Liberman just happened to mention in passing that the word “window” evolved from an earlier pair of words “wind” and “eye.”

So a window is the space in the wall where the wind looks in; or at least did until people started sticking sheets of glass in the way.

According to the OED the word “window” shows up first in English in the Ancrene Riwle, an old text I’ve talked about before here at podictionary.  This puts window around the year 1225, but its roots are quite a bit older.

There had been another word that English men and women used to describe the things we now call windows.  In Old English these were called eyethurls and since thurl is an old word for hole, this means eye holes.  This word had been part of English since the Germanic peoples came across the English channel in around 450.

I spent a few moments on a sort of sidetrack with thurl because I’ve come across it before in writing my book and looking at the word nostril, obviously nostril is nose thurl. Thurl is related to the word through which is obviously related to holes.

Anyway, eyethurl lost out in its battle as an English word to window.

There was another contestant that came into English around the same time as window.  The word “fenester” came from French and was used in English concurrently with the word “window” for more than 300 years up until about Shakespeare’s time.

The winner as we know wasn’t eyethurl, nor fenester, but window which didn’t come from French or Germanic Old English, but was brought down from the north by the invading Vikings, who, once they stopped burning and raping and pillaging, settled down and started living relatively peacefully with their English neighbors and thus injected words such as window into the language.

The American Heritage Dictionary says that window is an example of a type of word called a “kenning” that the Norse loved to invent.

Wikipedia tells me that a kenning is called a kenning from a norse phrase translating as “to express a thing in terms of another.” The example that is often trotted out is from Beowulf where the kenning “whale road” is used to mean the sea.  So the wind’s eye became window.

Government is always working on ways to get taxes, and if they are a good government they look for ways to make taxation fair.  About 100 years after the word window left eyethirl and fenester in the dust appeared one of these efforts.

Today I pay my municipal taxes based on an assessment of what my house is worth.  Centuries ago tax assessors didn’t have the real estate records to compare house values, much less the computers to crunch the numbers, so a few simpler tricks were tried.  If you were rich enough to have a hearth in your home you were rich enough to pay taxes.  Two hearths, ah, more tax please, etc.

Then in the late 1600s, if you have more than six windows in your house, tax.  More windows, more tax.

This lasted in England until 1851, over a century and a half with the result that a bunch of homeonwners bricked up a few windows so they wouldn’t have to pay.  My sources say that some of these windows are still bricked up.

Once the window in a building had gained its name for good and all, people started using the word window as a metaphor.  For example “the eyes are windows on a person’s soul” and in fact I see from one Oxford quotation that a nice pair of shoes are a window on someone’s soul too.

More recently we have windows of opportunity and of course we have windows on our computers.  Microsoft Windows of course isn’t the only operating system but all operating systems that open and close little panes on the screen are using a concept of windowing that was supposedly dreamed up and named at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre in the early 1970s.