bough

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English bough, also bogh and bowe,^[2][3] inherited from Old English bōg (“shoulder, arm; branch”), also bōh,^[4][2][5][6] inherited from Proto-Germanic *bōguz (“shoulder, upper arm”),^[1][7] from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeh₂ǵʰús (“arm”).^[1] The Germanic cognates mean shoulder or foreleg rather than branch: Old High German buog, Middle High German buoc, German Bug, Middle Dutch boech, Dutch boeg and Old Norse bógr, the last three also the bow of a ship.^[4][8][5] Further afield it is related to Sanskrit बाहु (bāhú, “arm, forefoot”),^[4][9] Ancient Greek πῆχυς (pêkhus, “forearm”), Doric πᾶχυς (pâkhus),^[4][5] and Tocharian A poke (“arm”).^[9][10] Kroonen relates it to the Germanic ancestor of bosom,^[7] which Ayto considers possible.^[11] The bow of a ship is ultimately the same word, but a late borrowing from Scandinavian or Low German.^[4] The OED rejects any tie with the verb būgan (“to bend”), despite the fit in sense,^[4] though Bosworth–Toller and Chambers derive the noun from that verb.^[12][13]

Earliest recorded meaning

Barnhart finds the form boog in the earliest glossaries, about 700, and bōg, "bough, shoulder", probably about 875, in a version of Genesis.^[3] The OED's Old English quotations are from Ælfric's Exodus for the shoulder of an animal and the West Saxon Gospels for a branch of a tree.^[4]

Semantic evolution

The word starts from the arm: its ancestors centre on "arm" or "forearm", and in Germanic the meaning seems to have moved up the arm to the shoulder.^[11] Old English had both "shoulder, arm" and "twig, branch", the tree's limb being named like a limb of the body,^[6] and only English came to use the word for a branch.^[11][6][14] The OED calls that sense an apparently English development,^[4][3] although Orel and Holthausen record Old Frisian bōg with a sense "branch" as well.^[10][15] The shoulder of an animal went out of use around 1400,^[4][8] and Scots kept a sense "limb, leg" from the 16th century.^[4][8] In the 13th to 17th centuries the tree sense was extended to a main branch of a vein or artery and to a branch of a family.^[4] From 1590 bough could mean the gallows, like tree, as in the legal proverb "The father to the bough, the son to the plough", which the OED ties to a custom of Kent.^[4] Johnson (1755) defined it as an arm or large shoot of a tree, bigger than a branch but not always told apart from one.^[16] Dialect use could differ: in west Somerset a bough was a smaller branch, the kind tied up for faggots.^[17]

Timeline

• c. 700 – the form boog, in the earliest glossaries.^[3]
• c. 875 – bōg, bough, shoulder, in a version of Genesis.^[3]
• Old English – a branch of a tree.^[4][8]
• Old English – the shoulder of an animal (obsolete by 1400).^[4][8]
• c. 1225 – a main branch of a vein or artery, or of a family (obsolete by 1668).^[4]
• before 1250 – the form bowe, in The Owl and the Nightingale.^[3]
• c. 1385 – the spelling bough, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.^[3]
• c. 1523 – verb, to strip of boughs (last record 1852).^[4]
• c. 1550 – in Scots, a limb or leg.^[4][8]
• 1590 – the gallows.^[4][8]

Meanings

Noun

1. A branch of a tree, especially one of the main ones: Snow bent the lower boughs of the pine.^{[18][9][19][20]}
2. (archaic) A gallows.^[9][8][13]
3. (Scottish) A limb or leg.^[4][8]
4. (obsolete, Old English–1400) The shoulder of an animal.^[4][8]

Verb

1. (rare) To strip a tree of its boughs.^[4][8]

Word family

• boughed
• boughless

Related words

• bow
• bosom

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b Kurath, Hans; Kuhn, Sherman M.; Lewis, Robert E., eds. (1952–2001), Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; online edition ed. Frances McSparran et al. (2000–2018)
3. ^ a b c d e f g Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
5. ^ a b c Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
6. ^ a b c Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
7. ^ a b Kroonen, Guus (2013), Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 11, Leiden / Boston: Brill
8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
10. ^ a b Orel, Vladimir (2003), A Handbook of Germanic Etymology, Leiden / Boston: Brill
11. ^ a b c Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
12. ^ Bosworth, Joseph; Toller, T. Northcote (1898), An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press; Toller, T. Northcote (1921), Supplement
13. ^ a b The Chambers Dictionary (2014), 13th ed., Edinburgh: Chambers
14. ^ Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
15. ^ Holthausen, Ferdinand (1934), Altenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Heidelberg: Carl Winter
16. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
17. ^ Wright, Joseph, ed. (1898–1905), The English Dialect Dictionary, 6 vols., Oxford: Henry Frowde; via EDD Online 4.0, University of Innsbruck (CC BY 4.0)
18. ^ Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
19. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
20. ^ Soanes, Catherine; Stevenson, Angus, eds. (2004), Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press