This episode brought to you by my book on the words we use for our bodies: Carnal Knowledge – A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia available at bookstores or online. For more information please visit www.navelgazersdictionary.com

All the dictionaries agree that the word echo came to English from Latin and that Latin got it from Greek.

Not all the dictionaries explore what might have gone before the Greek, nor pontificate as to whether French was part of the route between Latin and English.

Let’s take it in chronological order.

There was a Greek root word meaning “sound” ekhe and back in Classical Greece the Greeks tended to invent gods and personify everything to try and fit some kind of understanding to it.  So Echo became a nymph who lived in the woods.

As is the way with mythology there is no single clear tale about this nymph and how she came to hang out at cliff faces and shout back at you whatever it was you bellowed at the cliff.

One version is that she was a helpmate to Zeus, distracting his wife while he went off and had affairs with other nymphs.

Hera, Zeus’ wife eventually figured out why Zeus was coming home with pixy dust on his collar and vented her rage in part by casting a spell on Echo so that she could not say anything of her own volition, but only repeat what others said to her.

Another version of the tale is that Echo fell in love with Narcissus but since he was already in love with someone else—himself—he rejected her and she pined away until there was nothing left of her but her voice.

This ancient Greek myth sets the stage.  As with so many things the Romans adopted this little story from the Greeks and that’s why the dictionaries tell us the word came though Latin.

The very first citation that the Oxford English Dictionary mentions for the use of echo in English not as this nymph, but in the way we mean it when we say someone is repeating something back to us.

It’s actually an open question as to whether people applied this nymph’s name as metaphor to describe repetition, or whether the ancient Greeks themselves named the nymph because they already used this word in this way.  The OED Second Edition tends to lean toward the latter explanation.

The work echo first appears in in English is also of some interest because its title gives us a glimpse into the transition between Old English and Middle English.

The work is dated to 1340 and is called Ayenbite of Inwyt.  It was a translation from French although this title is thoroughly English even though it might not mean much to you.  These days it’s regarded as a good tool in trying to understand the dialect of Kent from around that time.

1340 was certainly a time when Middle English was taking firm hold and if the document was translated from French there was even more reason to think it might be written in Middle English.  But that title tells me that there was plenty of Old English tendencies hanging on in Kent.

The meaning of Ayenbite of Inwyt is “Remorse of Conscience.”  Ayenbite is “again bite” and is actually a literal translation of remorse; re meaning “again,” and morse meaning “bite” or “sting.”

Inwyt is the wit you have within you.  In this use it means your responsible inner knowledge but as a Middle English word it is actually a reinvention of an Old English word inwit that meant “deceit.”

So although both of these words are Middle English inventions, they follow the pattern of Old English where people loved to string together two words to create something new.