Etymologically
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heath

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Pronunciation

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English heth, inherited from Old English hǣþ (“untilled land; heather”),[2][3][4][5] inherited from Proto-Germanic *haiþī.[4][6][7] Its cognates are Old Saxon hētha (“heath, heather”), Middle Dutch heide, Old High German heida (“heather”), German Heide (“heath; heather”), Old Norse heiðr (“heath, moor”) and Gothic 𐌷𐌰𐌹𐌸𐌹 (haiþi, “field”).[4][8][9][10] Etymonline thinks the Old Norse word influenced the English one.[4] Kroonen explains the Germanic word as an archaic stem in *-ih₂-,[6] and its Celtic cognates are Old Irish cíad, Old Welsh coit, Welsh coed and Breton koad, all "wood, forest", from Proto-Indo-European *kaito- (“forest, uncultivated land”),[4][6][7][2][5] which also appears in Gaulish place names.[7][5] The OED notes the suggestion that Latin būcētum (“cow pasture”) is a further cognate.[8]

Earliest recorded meaning

Open, untilled land, waste ground: Old English, in the poem Exodus;[8][11] Barnhart dates the English sense "open wasteland, especially with heather growing on it" to about 1330.[9] The plant sense came earlier: the Épinal Glossary (about 700) has the word for a shrub of open places.[8][9]

Semantic evolution

Weekley thought it uncertain whether the land or the plant was the original sense,[12] but Partridge thinks the plant was named from the land it grows on,[13] and Ayto traces both to a Germanic noun for open, unploughed country.[14] Since Old English the word has named the shrubs of the genus Erica, of which common heath or ling is the commonest;[8][10] in 1617 it was first extended with qualifying words to related plants.[8] In Coverdale's Bible (1535) it translated a desert plant in two passages of Jeremiah, which the commentators identify variously.[8][11] Johnson (1755) gave the plant sense first, and only then "a place overgrown with heath".[15] The word heather itself is probably unrelated: Ayto takes it from a Scottish and northern Middle English hadder, reshaped after heath.[14] Heath also named a heath butterfly or moth from 1824.[8][11] In dialect the word formed many compounds, such as Hampshire and Somerset heath-cropper, a small, half-starved pony left to graze on a common, and Devon and Cornwall heath-hounds, a ghostly pack of hounds heard in the air.[16] The word heathen is often explained from it, as a dweller on the heath.[17][12]

Timeline

  • Old English – open, untilled land.[8]
  • Old English – a plant of open places; the shrub Erica, heather.[8]
  • 1535 – a desert plant in the Bible.[8]
  • 1617 – other plants of the heath family.[8]
  • 1625 – (obsolete) a wild part of a garden.[8]
  • 1824 – a heath butterfly or moth.[8]
  • 1862 – verb, to cover with heath.[8]

Modern meaning

Noun

  1. (chiefly British) An area of open, uncultivated land, usually with sandy or peaty soil and covered with low shrubs such as heather: They walked for hours across the heath.
  2. Any of various low evergreen shrubs of the genus Erica and related genera, with small bell-shaped, usually pink or purple flowers, also called heather.
  3. Any of several plants that resemble heath; in Australia, plants of the genus Epacris.
  4. A heath butterfly or moth.

Word family

  • heathy
  • heathberry
  • heathland
  • spike heath

Usage notes

One's native heath is a phrase for the place one comes from, one's home ground.[10]

References

  1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
  2. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  3. ^ Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
  4. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
  5. ^ a b c Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
  6. ^ a b c Kroonen, Guus (2013), Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 11, Leiden / Boston: Brill
  7. ^ a b c Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
  9. ^ a b c Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
  10. ^ a b c Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
  11. ^ a b c Kay, Christian; Roberts, Jane; Samuels, Michael; Wotherspoon, Irené, eds. (2009), Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edition (2024)
  12. ^ a b Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
  13. ^ Partridge, Eric (1966), Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 4th ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
  14. ^ a b Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
  15. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
  16. ^ 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)
  17. ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press