grange

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English graunge, also grange and gronge,^[2][3] borrowed from Anglo-Norman graunge,^[4][5][6] Old French grange (“barn, granary; farmstead”),^[5][3][7] from Medieval Latin grānica, also grānea,^[4][8] in Vulgar Latin *grānica.^[9][7][10] This is the feminine of an unrecorded adjective *grānicus (“of grain”), used as a noun (with villa understood),^{[11][12][8][13]} from Latin grānum (“grain, seed”),^[4][5][11] the source of grain and related to corn.^[11][3][14] The Anglo-Norman word is recorded from the early 13th century, meaning a barn or granary and a place where farming was carried on.^[15]

Earliest recorded meaning

Barnhart finds Grange first as a place name in 1252,^[3] and Etymonline in surnames and place names from the mid-13th century.^[5] As a common noun, a farming establishment or a group of farms, it is first recorded about 1300, in Havelok.^[4][3][5]

Semantic evolution

Ayto notes that the word originally meant a place for storing grain, a barn;^[11] the OED first records this sense in Chaucer's House of Fame, about 1384,^[4] and the MED has granges filled with grain in the Cursor Mundi.^[2] Its present-day senses grew from the farm: the farm-house in the 14th century and the country house in the 16th.^[11] An outlying farm with barns belonging to a monastery or a feudal lord, where crops and tithes in kind were stored, appears in Chaucer's Miller's Tale (c. 1390);^[4][5] the MED also has the sense "small farm" from 1440.^[2][3] The OED records a country house in general from 1552 to 1633,^[4] and Etymonline dates the country house of a gentleman farmer to the 1550s.^[5] Johnson (1755) defined a grange as a farm, generally with a house at a distance from neighbours.^[16] In the United States, from 1867, a grange was a local lodge of the Patrons of Husbandry, an association of farmers;^[5][4] Collins notes that it strongly influenced state legislatures in the late 19th century.^[6] In Scots the old sense "barn, granary" survived into the 19th century, and in Caithness the word fell out of use about the middle of that century.^[17]

Timeline

• 1252 – Grange, as a place name.^[3]
• c. 1300 – a farming establishment; a group of farms, a village.^[4][3]
• c. 1384 – a granary or barn.^[4]
• c. 1390 – an outlying farm belonging to a religious house or a feudal lord.^[4]
• 1440 – a small farm.^[2][3]
• 1552 – a country house (obsolete after 1633).^[4]
• 1867 – US, a lodge of the Patrons of Husbandry.^[5] The OED's first quotation is from 1875.^[4]

Meanings

Noun

1. (chiefly British) A farm, especially a farmhouse or country house with its barns and other outbuildings.^[6][14][8]
2. (historical) An outlying farmhouse with barns belonging to a monastery or a feudal lord, where crops and tithes were stored.^[6][14][4]
3. (US) A local lodge of the Patrons of Husbandry, an association of farmers;^[14][4] the Grange, the association itself.^[6]
4. (archaic) A granary or barn.^[6][14][4]
5. (obsolete, 1552–1633) A country house.^[4][14]

Related words

• garner
• grain
• granary
• granger

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d 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 h i 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 Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
6. ^ a b c d e f Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
7. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
8. ^ a b c Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
10. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
11. ^ a b c d e Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
12. ^ Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
13. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
14. ^ a b c d e f Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
15. ^ Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND2), Aberystwyth University, anglo-norman.net (2nd ed., 2005–)
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)