The word was first recorded in English in the 1520s, as a noun describing the arrangement of cargo in a ship's hold.
By 1544, in the Admiralty Court Libels, a court document, the word had become a verb. Behind it lay a French verb, arrumer, meaning to arrange cargo.
Arrumer was built on a Germanic word for 'space, or room'. It traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *reue-, meaning 'to open, or space'. The same root gave Latin its word for open countryside, and Russian its word for a plain.
ROOM and RURAL share the same root. ROOM is native to Old English, meaning space. RURAL entered English in the early fifteenth century, from Latin, describing anything belonging to the open countryside.
By the late sixteenth century the word had reversed its own meaning, now describing a sense of disorder and disturbance. By the early seventeenth century, customs officers used the word for searching a ship's hold, while pirates used it for plundering a captured vessel.
Seven letters.
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