To ponder something is to think about it. Although the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is for ponder as a noun, the verb, as we use it, actually has a longer history. It appears first in the written record in the late 1300s and not surprisingly comes into English through French, and beyond that from Latin. But because Christianity had come to England long before the Norman Invasion there were in fact Old English words that evolved out of the same Latin root ponderare.

In his book The Unfolding of Language Guy Deutscher makes the argument that all language development is basically due to the combined forces of human creativity and human laziness.

Well, that’s not quite how he puts it, but by laziness I mean that many words are actually compressed versions of longer strings of words that people over time have found more convenient to abbreviate or slur together. I’ve covered a number of these here at podictionary. One that springs to mind is the word goodbye that was originally “God be with you.”

But that’s not what I want to focus on today because that wasn’t the case with today’s word ponder. The human creativity part of the argument comes down to trying to express an idea by invoking another idea that the listener is already familiar with. A big part of the development of new words is metaphor. This is what applies to ponder. When you ponder something you are weighing it in your mind. The word ponder was once a metaphor for weighing something on a scale and is closely related to the word pound, as in the weight. That first citation from the OED that is for a noun ponder has in fact a meaning of “a weight” for use on a scale.

The American Heritage Dictionary takes the roots further back and into Indo-European. The idea here is that if you are weighing something it is hanging and pulling or straining on the thing it’s hanging from. With this thought in mind the connection is to an Indo-European root (s)pen that meant to “draw,” “stretch” or “spin.” My mind instantly jumped to an image of someone sitting at a spinning wheel drawing out a line of yarn. American Heritage links it to the word suspend.

But when you drop that leading S from the Indo-European root, the pen part not only makes more sense in relation to ponder, but other “hanging” words like pendulum.