Etymon #41
Fascinating bright fib
An Old English word, first recorded in the eighth century. In Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon poem composed between the eighth and tenth centuries, it describes a blood-stained lake to which Grendel drags himself after Beowulf tears off his arm in a battle.
The same root ran through the Germanic languages. The Heliand, a retelling of the Gospels commissioned around 830 AD, used the Old Saxon form. Old Norse and Middle High German had theirs. All of them named something bloodied and marked by the dripping of blood.
Built on an Old English noun meaning falling blood, the blood that drips from a wound rather than the wound itself. Behind that noun lay a Proto-Indo-European root describing the physical act of liquid falling, drop by drop. The root named the falling, not the blood itself.
DRIP and DRIZZLE share the same ancient root as this word. DRIP came from the same Proto-Indo-European source, naming the action of liquid falling in single drops. DRIZZLE came from the same Old English family, naming the finest, most persistent kind of rain. Both words trace back to the same root meaning to fall, to flow, to drip.
