Etymon #2
The oxen coupled
The adjective entered English in the late 1590s, a borrowing from scholarly Latin. Its earliest English use described pairs of structures in the body, named long ago for their resemblance to something earlier and more familiar.
Before it reached English, the word had a long life in scholarly Latin, the language of medical writing. Jacques Guillemeau, a pupil and son-in-law of Ambroise Paré, the father of modern surgery, used the word in his French surgical manual at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris in the 1590s. A Dutch edition followed, and from that came the English translation, printed at Dordrecht in 1598. By 1615, the adjective had quietly become a noun as well.
The Latin source noun meant collarbone. It was a diminutive: a smaller version of an older noun naming a wooden crossbar laid across the shoulders of two oxen so they could draw a plough together. The bone takes its name from the resemblance: a crossbar of bone above the chest, a crossbar of wood above the oxen.
To join, to bind together: that was the meaning of the deeper root. It survives in English as YOKE and in Sanskrit as YOGA. Both carry the sense of binding, and both reach back to a time when joining things together was the daily work of agriculture and craft.
