exhaust – podictionary 1085
Jan 11th, 2010 | 
Two senses come to mind when I think of the word exhaust:
- the pollution belching out of all the tailpipes on all the cars; and
- how I feel at the end of a long day.
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I considered the word exhaust first when I was doing some strenuous physical exercise. I wondered why when we are tired we say we are exhausted.
At the time I was sweating and puffing away and not in any position to use my reference materials so I looked for clues in the word itself.
The first part ex seems easy enough. That comes from the Latin word meaning “out.” But I couldn’t think of any other words I knew that might have a root aust or haust.
Now that I have a computer in front of me I see that the reason I didn’t know any words with an aust or haust root was that there really aren’t very many in the English language. Depending on the Latin search terms I use The Oxford English Dictionary only lists about 10 words with this root.
Of those the only word that seems to me in common use is exhaust. I mean, when was the last time you used any of the words inhaust, dehaust or haustorium in conversation?
Thinking about cars spewing their exhaust into the atmosphere gives me a sense of the gasses being pumped out of the car. But the etymology of the word makes me think of a rule my old physics professor once told me. You can’t push on a rope.
That Latin root means “draw”; the examples given are “to draw water.” So the exhaust coming out of a car in etymological terms needs to be thought of as being pulled out, not pushed out.
Suddenly my state of physical exhaustion makes sense. Every ounce of energy has been drawn out of me.
It’s kind of like when my bank account is empty; I made so many withdrawals that my funds are exhausted.
It turns out that one of the first uses of the word exhaust in English was in just this sense.
In 1540 King Henry VIII passed an act that talked about how “Innumerable summes of monei [had been] crafteli exhausted out of [his] realme.”
For this use the word had recently been adopted out of scholarly Latin and still had the “out draw” meaning to it.
We had to wait until the turn of the last century and the increasing popularity of cars and internal combustion engines before exhaust came close to referring to that stuff polluting our atmosphere.
At first the references were to car parts: we see exhaust cylinder in 1892 and exhaust box in 1903. It wasn’t until 1937 that the first citation for exhaust fumes appeared.
