All the dictionaries I checked tell me that an ode is a kind of poem and historically odes were sung.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first citation that we have for ode is from 1538, but the word goes much further back than that. Ode came to English from French and French got it from Latin that in turn borrowed it from ancient Greek.

Back there in Greek it wasn’t a poem but a song and the OED reports it was related to the Greek word for the human voice.

The OED stretches even further back linking it to a Sanskrit word meaning “to speak.”

The American Heritage Dictionary tends to lean even further out in attaching its etymologies back to Indo-European and in this case they tie ode to an Indo-European wed meaning “to speak.”

Since ode appears in writing almost 500 years after the Norman Conquest I’m guessing the word worked its way in during the aristocratic French of the intervening centuries as opposed to being a word that actually landed in England in 1066.

The guy who first did set ode to paper was a dictionary maker named Thomas Elyot. As I reported in the podictionary episode on the word stickler, Thomas Elyot was fortunate enough to have King Henry VIII take an interest in his dictionary project. That was after another little task King Henry had assigned to Elyot.

At the time there was a certain William Tyndale walking this earth who Henry VIII and a few other people were mighty angry at. Tyndale had figured it was a good idea to have a bible that people could read even thought they couldn’t speak Latin, so he translated it into English.

This really got the church angry so they called him a heretic.

That’s not what pissed King Henry off, what got Henry going was that Tyndale said Henry couldn’t get a divorce.

Between the church and the king Tyndale figured it might be wise to leave the country.

What all this has to do with our dictionary making friend Thomas Elyot is that Henry had sent Thomas Elyot across the English Channel to see if Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor was onside on the divorce thing. While Thomas Elyot was there he was also supposed to see if he could kidnap Tyndale so that Henry could try a little less diplomatic convincing on him.

No luck in either case which may have led to Thomas Elyot changing careers from diplomat to lexicographer.

But it didn’t do Tyndale any good either. He was caught in Belgium. As I said, people were mad at him. So mad that after he was sentenced to death they first strangled him and then just to be good and sure burned him at the stake.