Etymon #7
The fold continues
Borrowed from German, the word entered English in the 1830s, brought over by immigrants whose language carried it down from the Latin of monks and Greek before them. Its original sense was not to do with food: it described a shape made by the body itself.
Its first recorded English appearance is in an advertisement in the Ohio Repository of Canton, Ohio, on 23 December 1831, but the path is older. It runs through German, and before that Old High German, and before that Latin, with a Greek root deeper still. At every stage the word named the same part of the body.
The Latin root bracchium named the forearm, the limb between elbow and wrist, and the diminutive shape behind the word meant little arms. What gave the word its form was the figure arms make when folded one over the other.
The same Latin root reached English by other roads. It gave us BRACELET, a band worn on the arm, and EMBRACE, the act of taking someone into the arms. Both wear the arm-meaning openly. This word does not.
