laneway / laneway house

A Toronto laneway

4 March 2026

Literally, laneway (lane + way) is a redundant term, and one that is unfamiliar to most Americans. It is found in Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K. Originally simply meaning a road, the word in Canadian usage has narrowed to mean an urban back alley. 

Today, laneway is chiefly found in Canada, but older instances of the term are found chiefly in Ireland. The oldest example I’ve been able to find, however, is in England’s Lancaster Gazette of 11 May 1822 in a notice of a property sale that describes the bounds of the property:

Also, all that other Close, Inclosure Piece or Parcel of Land or Ground […] called or commonly known by the name of Priest’s Meadow, […] bounded on or towards the East and West by lands belonging to the Reverend James Pedder, on or towards the North, by the said laneway or road, called Harbreck-lane, and on or towards the South, by by lands belonging to William Mashiter.

We see the distinctly Canadian sense of an urban back alley in the early twentieth century. From the Toronto Daily Star of 5 June 1911:

The light necessary to the tenants of the offices on the east side of the Traders Bank building is supplied from windows looking out over a narrow laneway and across the roof of the Nordheimer building.

And there is this from the 2 November 1923 issue of the same paper that makes the distinction between a laneway and a street clear:

Juryman: “Do you know if this is a laneway or a street?”

Mr Murphy: “It is a laneway, and has not been opened as a street. Application has been made.”

In the latter half of the twentieth century we get the Canadianism of laneway house or laneway dwelling, referring to a small house built on a laneway behind an existing house. The term is especially prevalent in Toronto and Vancouver. But there are some earlier uses of that phrase is a different sense.

There is this from Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal of 15 January 1883 that uses laneway house to refer to a drinking establishment. There are very few instances of the phrase laneway house prior to the 1990s, so I don’t know if laneway house was an Irish term for a pub or bar, or if this was just a reference to a building alongside a road that happened to serve drinks:

Mr. Joseph Erskine objected to any extension of Mr. Mooney’s premises. It was in houses like his young men got charged with drink and afterwards adjourned to low beerhouses.

The Recorder—That is, to my mind, a most fanciful objection.

Mr. T W Russell said there was a small laneway house in St Peter’s parish, and if Mr. Mooney would add it to Poolbeg-st (laughter) the thing could, perhaps be managed. His lordship would remember that Galvin bought three laneway houses for one six-day licence, and Mr. Mooney ought to come up to the current rate.

Coming back to Canada, we see this 22 April 1977 classified ad in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, but it clearly refers to something not only rural but far more luxurious than what most Canadians today would consider a laneway house. Instead, this appears to be a return to the older sense of laneway = road with a house located at the end:

WOODBINE

PICTURE book reality. Passing the dammed pond you arrive at the end of the limestone laneway house, featuring many extras, including 3 fireplaces & family room. Offering cathedral ceiling, & car garage. This stylish property also offers 100 acres, barn & out buildings.

The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DHCP-2) says that the concept of laneway houses, built to create more affordable housing and as an eco-friendly way to increase urban density, dates to 1989. But the earliest use of the term that I’m aware of is from the Globe and Mail of 23 August 1997:

BUILDING a house with the front door on the back lane may not be up everyone’s alley. But for those hardy souls who want to build affordable yet unique dwellings in Toronto’s saturated core, a coach house or laneway house may be the only practical option.

[…]

The idea of living on a laneway, or at the end of an alley behind a series of back yards, gives many people the willies, but both women easily dismiss such concerns. “People are much friendlier in the back yard that at the front face,” Finlayson says, adding that this actually adds to her sense of protection.

While Ironside’s house is located in a slightly rougher area, she waxes poetic over laneway culture. “The stigma is totally undeserved. The life of the laneway is about kids playing, people working, pedestrian and bicycle connections. It’s so quiet on my lane. You have no sense that you’re just one row of houses from Queen and Bathurst.”

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Sources:

“$80,000 Is Paid by the Traders Bank.” Toronto Daily Star, 5 June 1911, 13/4. ProQuest Newspapers.

Classified Ad. Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario), 22 April 1977, BL17/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, second edition, October 2016, s. v. laneway, n., laneway house.

Kapusta, Beth. “Life in the Back Lane.” Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario), 23 August 1997, C15. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Licensing Sessions.” Freeman’s Journal (Dublin, Ireland), 15 January 1883. 7/6. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

“No One Was to Blame for Fatal Accident.” Toronto Daily Star, 2 November 1923, 6/4. ProQuest Newspapers.

“Notice is Hereby Given.” Lancaster Gazette (England), 11 May 1822, 2/5. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1901, s.v. lane-way, n.

Photo credit: OldYorkGuy, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Turtle Island

 Sculpture “Mother Earth: The Legend of Aataentsic” in the Jacques-Cartier Park, Gatineau, Québec, inspired by the Haudenosaunee story of Sky Woman

2 March 2026

Turtle Island is a calque of a Native American term from the creation accounts of tribes speaking languages of the Iroquoian and Algonquian families. It originally was a name for the world, taken from various stories in which the world is said to be the back of giant turtle swimming in the cosmic sea. In more recent use, Turtle Island has been used as a name for North America.

Turtle Island and the creation accounts came to attention of European settler-colonists in the Walum Olum (Red Record) which was claimed to be a historical narrative of the Lenape people. It was allegedly translated into English by C. S. Rafinesque in 1836. His version, however, doesn’t use the phrase Turtle Island calling it instead “that island” and “the turtle back”:

Meantime at TULA, at that island, NAMA-BUSH (the great hare Nana) became the ancestor of beings and men. Being born creeping, he is ready to move and dwell at TULA. The beings and men (Owini and Linowi) all go forth from the flood creeping in the shallow water, or swimming afloat, asking which is the way to the turtle back TULAPIN.

The term itself first appears in D. G. Brinton’s 1885 version of the Walum Olum, which also includes Rafinesque’s alleged transcription of the Lenape:

Tulapit menapit Nanaboush maskaboush owinimokom linowimoken. Giskikin-pommixin tulagishatten-lohxin. Owini linowi wemoltin, Pehella gahani pommixin, Nahiwi tatalli tulapin.

Nanabush, the Strong White One, grandfather of beings, grandfather of men, was on Turtle Island [Tulapit]. There he was walking and creating, as he passed by and created the turtle. Beings and men all go forth, they walk in the floods and shallow waters, down stream thither to the Turtle Island [Tulapin].

The Walum Olum is, however, now widely considered to be a hoax perpetrated by Rafinesque. Still, the idea that the world is the back of a giant turtle is a component of a number of genuine creation accounts of North American Indigenous peoples. For instance, there is the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) story of Sky Woman, the mother of humanity, who fell from the sky into the water-covered earth, and various animals gathered dirt from the bottom of the ocean, piling it on the back of a turtle to create land one which she could live.

Outside of Indigenous creation stories, one is likely to encounter Turtle Island as a name for North America. This particular usage is relatively recent. The earliest use in print that I’m aware of is in a pair of newspaper articles of 9 January 1972. One of these is in the Syracuse Herald-Journal:

The historic scene painted by Lyons shows foundation of the Great League, or Iroquois Confederacy, hundreds of years ago at Onondaga.

It includes the two founders of the Great League, the Great Peace Maker, at left, in the print, and Hiawatha.

Behind them is the Great Tree of Peace growing from the Great Turtle Island, symbolizing the North American Continent.

[…]

The Hou-du-no-shaun-ee, the People of the Long House, say formation of the confederation occurred hundreds of years before the first white man set foot on the Great Turtle Island.

The second is in Alabama’s Birmingham News:

THEY WERE Mohawk Indians from Akwesasne in Northern New York state, showing University of Alabama in Birmingham and others the Round Dance, part of the Indian heritage handed down through the generations since this continent was called Turtle Island.

And a few days later, poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder uses it in the New York Times of 12 January 1972:

On Hopi and Navajo land, at Black Mesa, the whole issue is revolving at this moment. The cancer is eating away at the breast of Mother Earth in the form of stripmining. This to provide electricity for Los Angeles. The defense of Black Mesa is being sustained by traditional Indians, young Indian militants and longhairs. Black Mesa speaks to us through an ancient complex web of myth. She is sacred territory. To hear her voice is to give up the European word “America” and accept the new-old name for the continent, “Turtle Island.”

Note that Hopi and Navajo use of the term, which undoubtedly predates Snyder’s article, represents an adoption of the name by Indigenous peoples other than the Haudenosaunee and Lenape, from whose myths the term arose.

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Sources:

Brinton, D. G., ed. The Lenâpé and Their Legends. Library of Aboriginal American Literature, no. 5. Philadelphia: 1885, 178–79. Archive.org.

Case, Richard G. “Honors Indians: Lyons Designs Print for Bank.” Syracuse Herald Journal (New York), 9 January 1972, 43. Newspapers.com.

O’Toole, Garson. “Re: [ADS-L] ‘Turtle Island’ (January 1972), ADS-L.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2016, s.v. Turtle Island, n.

Rafinesque, C. S. The American Nations; or, Outlines of Their General History, vol. 1. Philadelphia: 1836, 127–28. Archive.org.

Reeves, Garland. “Mohawk Indians Tell Students of Heritage Before White Man.” Birmingham News, 9 January 1972, 31-A/3–4. Newspapers.com.

Snyder, Gary. “Energy Is Eternal Delight.” New York Times, 12 January 1972, 43/5–6. ProQuest Newspapers.

Photo credit: Dennis G. Jarvis, 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Flickr. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

arch

Stella visiting Natural Bridge, a natural stone arch in Virginia

27 February 2026

Arch, in English, encompasses three broad senses. It can be a combining form signifying chief or high as in archangel or archbishop, it can mean clever or cleverly humorous, and it can mean a curved structure or to make a curved structure.

Of these, the combining form, arch-, is the oldest, dating to before the Norman Conquest. The combining form comes from the Greek ἀρχι- (arci-), as in ἀρχάγγελος (arcagelos). Borrowed into Latin, the Greek took the form arch-. In Old English, the original such combining form was heah-, the root of our modern high, as in heahbiscop or heahengel. But eventually Old English borrowed the Latin arch-, and heahbisecop became arcebisceop. In Middle English, under the influence of Anglo-Norman French, the arce- form became arch-, and we got words like archangel.

By the latter half of the sixteenth century, the combining form started to be used as a standalone adjective signifying chief or principal. Here we see arch so used in a translation from Latin of a 1574 biography of Matthew Parker, the seventieth (and first Protestant) archbishop of Canterbury:

For who woulde haue beeleued / that anye man / not in the behalfe off him selfe / but in the fauour off anye thoughe neuer / so arch a Prelate / would wrighte suche thinges / as you haue hearde heere.

About a century later, this use of arch started to be used to mean rogueish. We see both the older and the newer senses used back to back in the 1684 second part of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress:

Greath[eart]. Above all that Christian met with after he had past throw Vanity-Fair, one By-ends was the arch one.

Hon. By-ends; What was he?”

Greath. A very arch Fellow, a downright Hypocrite; one that would be Religious, which way ever the World went, but so cunning, that he would be sure neither to lose, nor suffer for it.

And by the early eighteenth century arch was being used in the sense of waggish or playful, especially in a conscious and affected manner. We see it in the 1–4 July 1710 issue of The Tatler in which Isaac Bickerstaff tells how actor Thomas Doggett asked him to make mention of his latest play:

Dogget thanked me for my Visit to him in the Winter; and after his comick Manner, spoke his Request with so arch a Leer, that I promised the Drole I would speak to all my Aquaintance to be at his Play.

(Isaac Bickerstaff is a pseudonym used in The Tatler by Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, and Jonathan Swift. I don’t know which one penned this one.)

Arch meaning a curved structure comes from a different root. It’s a fourteenth century borrowing from the Old French arche, which in turn coms from the Latin arca (chest, coffer) and arcus (bow), from the curved shape of both. We see this sense in John Trevisa’s 1387 translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon. The passage is part of a description of the city of Rome, and Trevisa uses arch to translate the Latin arcus:

Fast by þat temple is an arche of marbel, and is þe arche of Augustus Cesar his victories and grete dedes. In þat arche beeþ all Augustus Cesar his dedes descryued. Þere is also Scipions arche; he ouercom Hanibal.

(Close by that temple is an arch of marble, and it is the arch of Augustus Caesar, his victories, and great deeds. In that arch all of Augustus Caesar’s deeds are described. There is also Scipio’s arch; he overcame Hannibal.)

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Sources:

Bickerstaff, Isaac. The Tatler, 1–4 July 1710, no. 193, 1/1–2. In The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., vol. 1. London: John Morphew, 1710  Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which Is to Come: The Second Part. London: Nathaniel Ponder, 1684, 165. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. arce-

Higden, Ranulf. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis; together with the English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, vol. 1. Churchill Babingon, ed. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865, 215. Archive.org.

The Life off the 70. Archbishopp off Canterbury Presentlye Sittinge Englished. Zurich: 1574, sig. D.vii.r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 3 January 2026, s.v arch(e n.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1885, s.v. arch- comb. form, arch adj. & n., arch v.1, arch n.1.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2025. Licensable under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

dirigible

WWI British recruiting poster referring to German dirigible air raids on London

25 February 2026

Today, the word dirigible is almost always used as a noun, referring to a zeppelin-type airship, and I always had it in my head that the word was related to rigid, a reference to the rigid frame of such an aircraft. But that is not the case. The word began life as an adjective meaning capable of being directed or steered. It was formed from the Latin verb dirigere, meaning to direct, steer, or guide. So a dirigible is a steerable balloon.

The adjective makes its appearance in English by the late sixteenth century. Here is an example from William Lambarde’s 1588 Eirenarcha: or the Office of the Iustices of the Peace on oaths of office:

It would auayle greatly to the furtherance of the Service, if the Dedimus potestatem [delegated power] to giue these Oaths were dirigible to the Iustices (and none other) to minister the same not elsewhere, but in their open Sessions.

The adjective begins to be applied to balloons by latter half of the nineteenth century. From Littell’s Living Age of 21 August 1875:

The more important problem is, how to make a balloon travel, not with, but through the air; in the same manner as boat, instead of being floated along with the stream, is made to move in an independent course through the water. In short, we want what, if we may coin a word for the purpose, we may call a dirigible balloon.

And the noun dirigible, meaning a steerable balloon, is in place by the end of that century. From Montana’s Anaconda Standard of 11 September 1898:

[The French] have spent $80,000 some years upon their aeronautical department, and keep their progress secret, but statements have been made by those who ought to know that French dirigibles can now attain a speed of 25 miles an hour.

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Sources:

“Balloons and Voyages in the Air.” Littell’s Living Age (Boston, Massachusetts), 21 August 1875, 451–68 at 465/1. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

“Balloons Neglected.” Anaconda Standard (Montana), 11 September 1898, 18/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Lambarde, William. Eirenarcha: or the Office of the Iustices of the Peace, revised. London: Ralph Newberry, 1588, 62. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1896, s.v. dirigible, adj. & n.

Image credit: UK government, 1915. Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress, cph.3g10972. Public domain image.

sapphire

Four man-made sapphires

23 February 2026

Sapphire is a gem, usually blue in color, a variety of corundum. The word came into English from the Anglo-Norman saphir, which is from the Latin sapphirus, which, in turn, is from the Greek σάπφειρος (sappheiros). After the Greek, the trail gets muddy. It may come from a Semitic root, akin to the Hebrew sappir or the Aramaic sampirina, or it may come from a Proto-Indo-European root, akin to the Sanskrit canipriya, literally meaning dear to the planet Saturn, and used to refer to some dark gemstone. The difficulty in tracing the origin stems from the possibility of earlier borrowings between Semitic and Indo-European languages.

The earliest use of the word in English may be in Thomas of Hales’s thirteenth-century Love Ron:

Hwat spekestu of eny bolde
þat wrouhte þe wise salomon
of iaspe, of saphir, of merede golde,
& of mony on-oþer ston?
Hit is feyrure if feole volde
more þan ich eu telle con;
Þis bold, mayde, þe is bihote
if þat þu bist his leouemon.

(What do you say of any temple that the wise Solomon built of jasper, of sapphire, of refined gold, and of many other stones? It [i.e., the dwelling that God will give you] is fairer by many times, for than I can tell you. This temple, maid, is promised if you are his lover.)

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 5, 2018–21, s.v. saphir, n.

Middle English Dictionary, 3 January 2026, s.v. saphir(e, n.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1909, s.v. sapphire, n.

Thomas of Hales. “Friar Thomas de Hales’s Love Ron.” Carleton, Brown, ed. English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, lines 113–20, 71. Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29. Archive.org.

———. “Love Rune.” Susanna Fein, ed. Middle English Text Series (METS).

Photo credit: W. Carter, 2020. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.