The Language of Halloween

Halloween is much more than a holiday: it's a package. There's special Halloween candy, Halloween costumes and customs, Halloween colors, knick-knacks, and decorations. There is also a "Halloween language", a subset of vocabulary used a lot in the weeks preceding and culminating on October 31st.

Here is a sampler of the language of Halloween along with its linguistic baggage.

broom: No self-respecting witch would make her Halloween appearance without a broom. The word derives from a Germanic plant-name that appears as bramo, bramma, and (hiop)bramio in various Germanic languages. So a broom essentially bears the name of the plant the broom twigs come from. English bramble probably derives from the same root, although the Germanic words have also been applied to the wild rose and the hawthorn bush.

candy: The word candy goes all the way back to the Arabic word qand, which means "crystallized sugar". Then French jumped in and came up with the somewhat pleonastic sucre candi, i.e. sugar candy. From French, Middle English produced sugre candy, and the rest is (yummy) history.

cemetery: A cemetery is generally considered a spooky place, so what better way for language to deal with its morbid connotations than the use of euphemism? The word cemetery is of Greek origin. It found its way into English through Latin and French. Cemetery ultimately derives from the Greek koimeterion, which means "dormitory" (from the Greek verb koiman, to put to sleep).

coffin: Coffin is also of Greek origin: from kophinus (a basket), through Latin cophinus and French cofin. At first, the word just meant "box", "receptacle". In the 16th century, the innocuous cofin (which also had the variation coffre), split into two meanings: the dreaded coffin and the neutral coffer.

ghost: The scary, vengeful ghosts that roam the earth on Halloween, might be disappointed to know that their linguistic ancestors were neither scary nor vengeful. In Old English, ghost simply meant "spirit", a meaning preserved when we refer to the Holy Ghost. Sometime in the 14th century, however, the word began to denote the restless spirit of a dead person, a demon among the living. Interestingly, if we go back to the distant Indo-European relatives of ghost, the connotations of fright and vengefulness seem to have originated there: Old Norse geisa means "rage" and so does Sanskrit hedas, while Gothic usgaisjan means "to terrify".

grave: The word for "burial place" goes back to the Indo-European root for "dig" (hence the English verb engrave).

Halloween: Halloween is a condensed form of the phrase All Hallow Even, i.e. All Saints' Eve. (The alternative spelling Hallowe'en is closer to the word's etymology.) Hallow means "holy", so Halloween is the Eve of All Hallows, i.e. all saints. Hallow and Halloween derive from the Old English adjective halig (holy).

pumpkin: Contrary to appearances, the word pumpkin does not derive from pump. Pumpkin derives from the Greek pepon, a kind of melon eaten only when very ripe. The word route is all familiar by now: Latin took over pepon as pepo, then French produced popon/pompon, hence pumpion, hence pumpkin.

skull: Skull first appeared in Middle English as skulle. (Old English had a completely different word for skull, heafodpanne, i.e. head-pan.) Skulle must have been borrowed from the Scandinavian language family. (Cf. Swedish and Norwegian skalle.)

witch: Witch is descended from Old English wicce (the feminine form of wicca, wizard) and is of Germanic origin. It may also be related to wicked, victim, and holy, the idea being that a wicce (witch) was originally a priestess who sacrificed victims during holy rituals.

Source:

Merriam-Webster Online: http://www.m-w.com