leño

Forms

leño m (plural leños)^[1] Old Spanish wrote lenno (lennos) for the sound /ɲ/, as in the Fuero de Zorita and the 13th-century Bible translations.^[2]

Etymology

It is inherited from Old Spanish lenno, inherited from Latin lignum (“wood, firewood”).^[3][4][1][2] The Latin plural ligna gave the collective leña “firewood”, while the singular gave this word, “a log, a piece of a cut tree”.^[4][5] Bénaben points out the contrast between the feminine word for firewood in general and the more concrete masculine.^[6]

The same Latin word is Portuguese lenho, Galician leño, Catalan lleny, Italian legno and Romanian lemn, and its plural lives on in Portuguese lenha, Catalan llenya and Italian legna.^[7][1][8]

The Latin noun meant above all wood for burning, as against materia (“timber”).^[9][10] De Vaan derives it, through *legno-, from Proto-Indo-European *leǵ- (“to gather”), as “wood collected for the fire”, the root of legō (“to gather”); an origin from *legʰ- (“to lie”), as “wood lying about”, seems to him equally possible.^[11][1]

Earliest recorded meaning

A Castilian translation of the history La fazienda de Ultra Mar (c. 1200, in a 13th-century copy) tells the story of the widow who goes out to gather .ii. lennos, two sticks, to bake bread for herself and her son.^[2] The Fuero de Zorita de los Canes (1218–c. 1250) counts todo lenno, “any piece of wood”, among the things a man can wound or kill with.^[2]

Semantic evolution

As early as 1257 a royal grant to Cartagena speaks of the owners of navios armados o de lennos cubiertos, “armed ships or decked leños”: the word named a kind of ship.^[2] Medieval Latin used lignum in the same way for a ship.^[12] Corominas dates the sense of a galley-like vessel from 1430.^[4][5] Covarrubias (1611) explained it through Italian, where legno meant a ship, and through the Latin poets, who called a ship by the pine it was built of;^[13][14] Autoridades (1726–1739) took leño for any ship by synecdoche, quoting Cervantes and Lope de Vega.^[13][14] The Academy still lists the medieval oar-and-sail ship and, in poetry, any boat.^[3]

The figurative sense of a dull, clumsy person is in the Academy's dictionary of 1843; the DLE adds a tiresome, unbearable person, and dormir como un leño “to sleep like a log”.^[15][3] The botanical sense, the woody tissue of a plant (xylem), appears in modern dictionaries.^[3][16][17] In Mexico, Central America and the Dominican Republic the word is slang for the penis and for a marijuana cigarette, and in Honduras it also means a foolish or unskilled man.^[18][19][1] In the Canaries a leño is a tall, strongly built person, and un leño de stresses the great size of something.^[20]

Timeline

• c. 1200 – La fazienda de Ultra Mar, in a 13th-century copy, has lennos “sticks”.^[2]
• 1218–c. 1250 – the Fuero de Zorita de los Canes has lenno “a piece of wood”.^[2]
• 1257 – a charter for Cartagena uses lennos cubiertos for ships.^[2]
• 1430 – first record of the sense “galley-like ship” in Corominas.^[4][5]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija gives lignum as the Latin for leño, “a single one”.^[21][22]
• 1526 – a chronicle of the Indies mentions logs of brazilwood (leños) found on an island off Nicaragua.^[23]
• 1611 – Covarrubias derives leño from Latin lignum and explains the ship sense.^[13]
• 1726–1739 – Autoridades defines the log and, by synecdoche, the ship.^[14]
• 1843 – the Academy records the figurative sense “a person of little talent”.^[15]

Meanings

Noun

1. A log: a piece of a tree trunk or thick branch, cut and stripped of branches: Puso otro leño en la chimenea.^[3][1][17]
2. (botany) The hard part of a tree under the bark (corteza); the woody tissue that carries the sap, the xylem.^[3][16]
3. (historical) A medieval ship with sails and oars, like a galeota.^[3]
4. (poetic) A ship or boat.^[3]
5. (colloquial) A dull, clumsy person; also a tiresome, unbearable person.^[3][17]
6. (Mexico, Central America, Dominican Republic, slang) The penis; a joint of marijuana.^[18][19][1]

Related words

• leña
• leñador
• leñazo
• leñero
• leñoso
• lignito
• Latin lignum

Usage notes

Dormir como un leño means to sleep deeply.^[3][17] Leño names a single log, leña firewood as a mass.^[6]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. leño
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j 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. leño
4. ^ a b c d Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 3, 631
5. ^ a b c Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. leña
6. ^ a b Bénaben, Michel (2000), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'espagnol, Paris: Ellipses, p. s.v. leño
7. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. art. 3875
8. ^ Segura Munguía, Santiago (2001), Nuevo diccionario etimológico latín-español y de las voces derivadas, Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, p. 425
9. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
10. ^ Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
11. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
12. ^ Niermeyer, J. F. (1976), Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, Leiden: Brill, p. s.v. lignum
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. 1078
14. ^ a b c Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 4, 385
15. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1843), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 9th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Francisco María Fernández, p. 435
16. ^ a b Battaner Arias, Paz (dir.) (2017), Diccionario general de la lengua española VOX, Barcelona: Larousse Editorial, p. s.v. leño
17. ^ a b c d Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. leño
18. ^ a b Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. leño
19. ^ a b Academia Dominicana de la Lengua; Instituto Guzmán Ariza de Lexicografía (2024), Diccionario del español dominicano, 2nd ed., online at https://ded.igalex.org, p. s.v. leño
20. ^ Academia Canaria de la Lengua (2010), Diccionario básico de canarismos, Santa Cruz de Tenerife; online at https://www.academiacanarialengua.org, p. s.v. leño
21. ^ Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 370
22. ^ 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. leño
23. ^ 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. leño