The word was first recorded in English by 1398, from Latin. The translator John Trevisa worked on De Proprietatibus Rerum, an encyclopaedia by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, a thirteenth-century Franciscan friar, translated as 'On the Properties of Things'. He used the word to describe a number whose own parts, added together, made a total greater than itself.
An earlier form of the word was recorded as early as 1384, in the Wycliffite Bible's translation of the Gospel of Luke. By the early fifteenth century it had been reshaped, gaining an English ending, and borrowed a second time directly from Latin.
Behind the Latin word lay two parts, a prefix meaning 'over', and a verb meaning 'to flow'. Behind that verb lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *bhleu-, meaning 'to swell, or well up'. The same root gave English the word flux, meaning a constant state of flowing change.
FLUENT and BLOAT share the same root. FLUENT entered English in the 1580s, first describing water flowing freely, before being applied to someone who could speak well. BLOAT entered English in the 1660s, meaning to cause something to swell.
By the mid-nineteenth century the word had taken on a new meaning, describing women left unmarried because the general population had more women than men, a gap caused by male emigration and dangerous, often fatal, work conditions of the era. George Bernard Shaw, in 1911, noted that around a million British women faced this same statistical fate. By the twentieth century the word had settled into its now-familiar, gentler meaning.
