Etymon #64
Day's twenty miles
The word entered English around 1200 from Old French. Its earliest recorded appearance is in the Ancrene Riwle, a guide to the religious life written for three young sisters who had chosen to be enclosed for life as anchoresses, each in a cell attached to a church, considered from the day of her enclosure to be dead to the world. Advising them on the life ahead, the anonymous author wrote of the pilgrim making his way through the world, with many things to hinder him before he reaches his end. The first recorded English use of the word belongs to three women who would never travel again. The word's original French sense measured time. Behind the French lay Latin, and behind Latin lay a single ancient root.
Old French carried it into English, and in French it named a fixed span of time, and the work or distance that could fit inside it. The same popular Latin word gave Italian giornata. In medieval England the distance it named was estimated at around twenty miles, and the writer of Mandeville's Travels, the fourteenth century's most popular book of marvels, measured the world in these units. A Middle English verse of around 1305 used the word to mean the spans of life itself, advising a man his time was counted and his end already cast.
Behind the French lay a word built on Latin diurnus, 'of the day', and behind it dies, the Latin for 'day'. At its source the word named a single day, and everything a day could hold. Dies itself descended from a Proto-Indo-European root, *dyeu-, meaning 'to shine', naming the bright sky. The same root gave Latin deus, meaning 'god', and Sanskrit deva, literally 'the shining one', and Lithuanian still holds the pair, diena for the day and dievas for the god. From it came the names of Zeus and Jupiter, and the English Tuesday, the day of the god the Anglo-Saxons called Tiw.
DISMAL and DIARY share the same Latin root. DISMAL came through Anglo-French from Medieval Latin dies mali, the 'evil days', the two days in every month that medieval calendars marked as unlucky, supposedly on the ancient calculations of Egyptian astrologers. A dismal day was originally one of these twenty-four, and only in the 1580s did the word soften into general gloom. In 1849 Thomas Carlyle named political economics the dismal science, and the name stuck. DIARY entered English in the 1580s from Latin diarium, which first meant a daily allowance, and later a record of the days as they pass.
For centuries the word meant not only a day's travel, but a day's work and a day's fighting. William Langland used it in Piers Plowman in 1393 for the ploughman's daily labour, done and paid by nightfall. A letter of 1455 records the lords who died at the first battle of the Wars of the Roses, when a battle was a day's work of war, and at the Royal Mint the word named the day's coinage, fifteen pounds of standard gold. In 1755 Samuel Johnson still gave the travel of a day as the primary sense. In January 1908 the drivers of London's motor buses went on strike over whether they should be paid by the day or by each completed run, six hundred years after this word had simply meant the day.
Seven letters.
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