botar

Forms

botar (first-person singular present boto, first-person singular preterite boté, past participle botado)^[1]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Old French boter (“to strike, push, put”), modern French bouter, which is from Frankish *bōtan (“to push, strike”).^[2][3][1][4] The DCECH takes it into Spanish through Old Gascon botar.^[2] The DLE leaves out the French and Gascon steps.^[5] The Frankish verb is related to English beat, Old English bēatan, Middle High German bōzen and Old Norse bauta, all from Proto-Germanic *bautaną (“to beat”), whose further origin is unknown.^[2][6][1]

The same French word gave Portuguese botar, recorded from the 14th century; Italian buttare is also related.^[7][8][1] The DHLF calls both the Spanish verb, of about 1250, and the Portuguese one borrowings from French, and finds a Gaulish source for them poorly founded.^[8]

Gamillscheg held that the Spanish and Portuguese verbs descend at least in part from Gothic *bautan.^[2] The DCECH rejects this: the Gothic word would have given Galician-Portuguese *boutar, and the verb is most alive along the Atlantic coast, from Portugal through Galicia, Asturias and Santander to the Basque Country, which points to an entry from France.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is in the Libro de Alexandre (c. 1250), where the starving men lick their swords and drink las orinas botadas, urine that has been passed: the verb means “to throw out, cast”.^[2][3][9] An earlier botasse in Berceo's Vida de Santo Domingo (c. 1236) belongs to a different verb, “to blunt, corrupt”, from the adjective boto “blunt”.^[10][11][12]

Semantic evolution

In Old Spanish the verb meant “to throw, cast” with any object, a sense that lives on in almost all of Latin America (botar una piedra “to throw a stone”), in Leonese and in Galician-Portuguese.^[2] Elsewhere in Spain it lost ground, came to mean “to throw out with force”, and specialised: “to launch a ship” (1535) and “to throw the ball hard” (c. 1500), from which came the intransitive “to bounce, to jump” (1439).^[2] Covarrubias in 1611 gives the ball game sense and botar afuera “to throw something out with force”, which he calls a French word.^[13] Autoridades remarked that botar as “to throw out” was little used outside Galicia, and it recorded the nautical botar al agua “to launch” and botar the helm.^[2][14] The Canaries kept the old sense under Portuguese influence.^[2][15]

In Latin America the verb took on many uses: “to dismiss from a job”, “to squander”, “to lose”, “to knock down” and “to throw away”.^[5][16] Salvá already listed “to dismiss a servant” and “to squander one's fortune” as Americanisms in 1846.^[17] The purists of the Americas condemned its spread: Cuervo in Bogotá objected to botar la plata for “to waste money”.^[18][19]

Timeline

• c. 1236 – Berceo uses botar “to blunt, corrupt”, a separate verb.^[10][11]
• c. 1250 – botar “to throw out” in the Libro de Alexandre, the first record.^[2][3]
• 1439 – the intransitive sense “to jump, to come out”.^[2]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija gives botar echar fuera with Latin extrudo, and botar la pelota.^[20][21]
• c. 1500 – “to throw the ball hard”.^[2]
• 1535 – “to launch a ship”.^[2]
• 1548 – the first record from the Americas, unloading barrels in Santo Domingo.^[22]
• 1611 – Covarrubias calls botar afuera a French word.^[13]
• 1877 – first record of the derivative botadura “launching”.^[3]

Meanings

Verb

1. (transitive) To throw out, cast out, put out (someone or something).^[5]
2. (transitive) To launch a ship, sliding it down the slipway after building or careening.^[5]
3. (transitive) To bounce a ball or other elastic body against a hard surface.^[5][23]
4. (nautical, also intransitive) To put the helm over to bring the bow to the desired course.^[5]
5. (transitive, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela) To knock down, let fall.^[5]
6. (transitive, Latin America) To squander goods, especially money.^[5][1]
7. (transitive, Latin America) To fire, dismiss from a job.^[5][16][1]
8. (transitive, rural Costa Rica and Honduras) To cut down trees or scrub.^[5]
9. (transitive, Cuba, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Venezuela) To lose or mislay something.^[5][16]
10. (intransitive, of an elastic body) To rebound off a hard body.^[5]
11. (intransitive, of a ball) To bounce.^[5]
12. (intransitive, of a person) To jump up from the ground.^[5]
13. (intransitive, of a body) To jolt, bouncing repeatedly over an uneven surface.^[5]

Word family

• bote
• botadura
• botador
• botadero
• rebotar
• botafuego
• botarate
• botavara
• botivoleo

Related words

• botafumeiro
• botarel
• arbotante
• botón
• French bouter
• Portuguese botar
• English beat

Usage notes

The set phrase estar alguien que bota means “to be beside oneself”, especially with anger.^[5] The DLE still lists an obsolete botar “to blunt, dull”, the verb of Berceo, which belongs with embotar and the adjective boto “blunt”.^[5][11] Since ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩ sound alike, the verb is a homophone of votar “to vote; to swear”, and Covarrubias lists botar “to swear” as a spelling of it.^[13]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 1, 639
3. ^ a b c d Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. botar
4. ^ Bénaben, Michel (2000), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'espagnol, Paris: Ellipses, p. s.v. botar
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. botar
6. ^ Orel, Vladimir (2003), A Handbook of Germanic Etymology, Leiden / Boston: Brill
7. ^ Cunha, Antônio Geraldo da (2010), Dicionário etimológico da língua portuguesa, 4th ed., Rio de Janeiro: Lexikon
8. ^ a b Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert
9. ^ Alonso Pedraz, Martín (1986), Diccionario medieval español: desde las Glosas Emilianenses y Silenses (s. X) hasta el siglo XV, 2 vols., Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, p. 542
10. ^ a b Lanchetas, Rufino (1900), Gramática y vocabulario de las obras de Gonzalo de Berceo, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, p. 192
11. ^ a b c Boggs, R. S.; Kasten, Lloyd; Keniston, Hayward; Richardson, H. B. (1946), Tentative Dictionary of Medieval Spanish, 2 vols., Chapel Hill, N.C., p. 81
12. ^ Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. botar
13. ^ a b c Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de (1611), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sánchez (Biblioteca Wordkers transcription, CC BY 4.0), p. 335
14. ^ Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 1, 660
15. ^ Academia Canaria de la Lengua (2010), Diccionario básico de canarismos, Santa Cruz de Tenerife; online at https://www.academiacanarialengua.org, p. s.v. botar
16. ^ a b c Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. botar
17. ^ Salvá, Vicente (1846), Nuevo diccionario de la lengua castellana, París: Librería de Don Vicente Salvá, p. 166
18. ^ Cuervo, Rufino José (1914), Apuntaciones críticas sobre el lenguaje bogotano, 6th ed., París: A. & R. Roger y F. Chernoviz, p. 350
19. ^ Gagini, Carlos (1893), Diccionario de barbarismos y provincialismos de Costa Rica, San José: Tipografía Nacional, p. 92
20. ^ Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 305
21. ^ Lleal, Coloma (dir.), DICCA-XV: Diccionario del castellano del siglo XV en la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, Grup d'Estudis d'Història de la Llengua (GHCL), https://ghcl.ub.edu/diccaxv, p. s.v. botar
22. ^ Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. botar
23. ^ Battaner Arias, Paz (dir.) (2017), Diccionario general de la lengua española VOX, Barcelona: Larousse Editorial, p. s.v. botar