buck up

29 April 2026

Today, buck up usually means to cheer up, to be encouraged. But in the past it was used in a wider range of meanings with the base sense of to become confident and assertive. The metaphor underlying the phrase is the behavior and attitude of a male goat or buck, especially the ram’s assertive behavior when it comes to the females in the flock.

The present-day word buck comes from the Old English bucca, a male goat. In a single late manuscript, buc glosses the Latin cervus, a stag or male deer, but the overwhelming number of uses in Old English mean goat.

The earliest use of buck up that I have found are in the writing of James Kirke Paulding. In his 1828 New Mirror for Travellers, Paulding writes:

Single gentlemen of a certain age should beware how they “buck up” to widows, unless they have previously brought themselves, as Lady Macbeth—who was undoubtedly a widow when Macbeth married her—says, “to the sticking place,” that is, to the resolution of committing matrimony at a moment’s warning. Your widows, if they mean to marry again at all, never like to linger on the funeral pyre of a bachelor’s indecision.

And a few years later, Paulding’s 1831 The Dutchman’s Fireside has this:

The noisy, but well-meaning Ariel, made matters still worse, by occasionally urging the young man to “buck up,” as he called it, to the young lady, and show his breeding.

And buck up could mean to smarten up, to dress in finer clothes, especially when courting the ladies. There is this from Ohio’s Jefferson Democrat of 29 August 1832, an article which assumes the character and dialectal spelling of a country bumpkin, which was a newspaper trope of the era (cf. okay):

I seed her at church one day fixed up kinder pretty snug; so says I to myself; I recon that aint a slow kind of bit furniture, and darn [dam?] my sealskin pumps if I don’t buck up to her next First-day; she’s a dreadful nice gal I tell you.

But early use wasn’t confined to America. The following appeared in London’s New Sporting Magazine of July 1833 in “A Trip to Paris with Mr. Jorrocks,” written by “A Yorkshireman,” where buck up is used in the cheer-up sense we’re used to today:

That’s right, Colonel, you are yourself again; I always thought you would come back to the right course; and now you are good for a glass of claret or light hermitage. Come old boy, buck up, and give a loose to pleasure for once in your life, and may you never know what it is to want, as the beggarboys say.

But buck up could also mean to pay or provide support for. An ad in the Norwich, New York’s Anti-Masonic Telegraph of 22 January 1834 uses it in a warning to those who have not paid their debts to the advertiser:

Buck Up.

All persons indebted to the subscriber, must pay up before the 20th of February, or they will be dealt with according to the revised statutes, (and a number of dull ones will get a job before that time.)

All that have promised grain, wood, or Lumber, must redeem their promise before the first of February, or cash well [sic] be required.

JAMES M. D. CARR
Norwich, Jan. 15, 1834.

The ad continued to run in the paper through June (always with the due date of 20 February), indicating that not many actually bucked up and paid Mr. Carr.

And the Pennsylvania Republican of 23 March 1842 ran a similar ad aimed at subscribers who had not paid their bill:

BUCK UP!

The Banks have resumed Specie Payments they say, and of course the HARD STUFF is plenty! We beg leave very disinterestedly of course, to advise those who owe the printer, of the fact, that the First of April is close at hand, and that therefore now is the time to “BUCK UP THE READY DOWN JOHN DAVIS,” either in specie or notes!—“we’re no ways particular which!!” Money we WANT—Money we MUST HAVE—so look out!

The support sense could be political as can be seen in this from Ohio’s Elyria Republican of 19 February 1835:

[…] and the Hon. Benjamin Tappan of Ohio. Out of this long list of candidates, the convention cannot but select a proper man. They are all “good men and true.” We have no like or dislike to express. But if urged into an expression, we should have no objection to buck up for the last named gentleman.

Or it could mean to support the downtrodden. From the Baltimore Sun of 12 August 1837:

And finally we have known men who would praise the press, and patronize the printer; but who would be among the last to signify or buck up the needful.

The earliest citation of buck up in the Oxford English Dictionary (in an old, yet-to-be revised entry) is from Joseph C. Neal’s short story “Silverton Shakes,” which was serialized in Philadelphia’s Spirit of the Times. In this appearance it returns to the sense of having confidence when courting women. From the 20 December 1843 issue of that paper:

“They’ve got free schools and high schools and universities and colleges—they learn to cypher—to read languages—to understand mathematics and all sorts of things—comparatively useless things—but who is taught confidence—that neat kind of confidence which don’t look like confidence. […] Isn’t it doleful?”

“Very,[”] said Shiverton, mournfully.

“Well, now, for my part, I don’t see the trouble,” said Mrs.Fitzgig; “why can’t a man buck up?”

“Nor I,” added Miss Jemima Fitzgig, who wanted to be Mrs something. “It is the easiest thing in the world to get along, especially among the ladies,” and she glanced tenderly at Mr. Dashoff Uptosnuff.

“You must make an effort, Shiverton—one plunge and all will be over—go to Marygold’s determined on boldness. Sooner or later, you must begin. It is impossible to dodge in this way forever.”

Discuss this post

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Sources:

“Buck Up.”  Anti-Masonic Telegraph (Norwich, New York), 22 January 1834, 3/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Buck Up!” Pennsylvania Republican (York), 23 March 1842, 3/1. Newspapers.com.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. bucca, bucc, n.

Elyria Republican (Ohio), 19 February 1835, 1/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 12 April 2026, buck up, v.2, buck up, excl.

“Joe Bunker’s Story.” Jefferson Democrat (Steubenville, Ohio), 29 August 1832, 1/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Neal, Joseph C. “Shiverton Shakes.” Spirit of the Times (Philadelphia), 20 December 1843, 1/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, 1888, s.v. buck, v.7., buck, n.1.

Paulding, James Kirke. The Dutchman’s Fireside, vol. 1 of 2. New York: J. & J. Harper, 1831, 25. HathiTrust Digital Library.

———. New Mirror for Travellers. New York: G. & C. Carvill, 1828. HathiTrust Digital Library.

“We Have Known, and We Have Not Known.” Sun (Baltimore, Maryland), 12 August 1837, 2/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Yorkshireman, A. “A Trip to Paris with Mr. Jorrocks.” New Sporting Magazine (London), 5.27, July 1833, 207. ProQuest Historical Periodical.

Photo credit: Stuart Caie, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

college widow

Lobby card for the 1927 film The College Widow, starring Dolores Costello

27 April 2026

College widow is a term you don’t hear anymore, except in historical usage. It harkens back to a time when only men attended university and short-lived love affairs between the male students and female residents of college towns were common.

A college widow was often, but not always, an older woman. Whether she was a naïve romantic wronged by a series of men or a predatory cougar using and discarding the students varies with the perspective of the user of the term.

The term is an Americanism dating to the middle of the nineteenth century. (The Oxford English Dictionary has an 1829 citation for college widows, but that seems to be a nonce collocation of the words in a different sense, that of a charitable institution.) The earliest I have been able to date it to is a piece entitled “An Old Maid’s Soliloquy” that appeared in the Temperance Crusader of Penfield, Georgia on 15 March 1856 that very succinctly defines the term college widow:

Twenty years have I been on the carpet. I have had numerous suitors, and visitors without number. I have been besonnetted by poetical geniuses in almost every class graduated since my debut. Yet despite of all this, I am a “college-widow” with as little prospect as ever of being comforted in my widowhood.

I particularly like the use of "besonnetted."

And on the same day, this appeared in Pennsylvania’s Sunbury American:

Was there any mental stimulant, such as love, hate, remorse, that I had not tried? No. I hated every body. I had been in love with all the “college widows,” and several beside.

A few years later, on 2 April 1859, this piece appeared in Illinois’s Springfield Daily Republican advising a young man who was disenchanted with the affections of college widows to switch schools to a seminary where he would learn the Christian benefits of the institution of marriage:

Meanwhile, this case of yours is easily sealed. I understand it all. You conceived a disgust for the college widows of your Alma Mater. I plead guilty to the same soft impeachment. You have come home and generously[?] distributed your dislike for a few over the best half of creation; I went to the seminary a year ago, and have been purged of mine most effectually. You should go to the seminary, sir. Capital place, that, to dissipate your monkish notions, and to impress upon your mind the sacredness and blessedness of that good old Gospel institution, wedlock; with all the beneficial appurtenances which do either accompany or flow therefrom.

The Bomb, a humor magazine of Middlebury College in Connecticut published this poem on “flamming” in its 24 April 1860 issue:

In college halls this word is found;
The college walls this word resound;
By college boys is flamming done;
From this do “college widows” come.
“But flamming! pray what may it mean?”
Is asked quite oft by Freshmen green;
[…]
The student claims with all his heart
To love the maid—that ne’er must part;
But when his college course is done,
He’ll seek for her and him a home;
And there they’ll live in constant bliss;
The vow is sealed by mutual kiss.

It happens oft by such pretensions,
He shields at first some vile intentions.
At best, for her no more he cares,
Than she herself for what she wears;
For swiftly as the fashions glide,
Old robes are shed and new ones tried;
So students oft their flams arrange;
That every year they make a change.

The 21 March 1861 issue of the Democrat and Reflector of Schenectady, New York has this that bemoans the fate of such wronged women:

“College Widows.”—To go into mourning in the spring time is peculiarly incongruous. Sad must be the heart that bleeds amid the birds caroling. […] Their mammas told them students could not always be trusted, but who could believe mamas against a mouse—tach? “A look so young—so ingenious—so kind?” “I told you he was only flirting.” Well, term has ended—he is not even coming to commencement! Oh! O is he gone! Lucinda calls on Julia—Julia calls on Cecilia, all are weeping.—Let us go to society meeting to-night Boys part—well primed—last drink “To the College Vidders.”

This piece in Massachusetts’s Pittsfield Sun of 28 May 1863 casts the archetypical local gossip and scold, Mrs. Grundy, as a college widow; one speculates that perhaps she acquired her prudish attitude as a result of being wronged by a series of young men:

However, we would not have you believe that nothing at all has happened, that Williams, buried in her winter’s snows, has been in a state of grand lethargy like the hibernation of bears, that for the past three months the numerous ladies of the place have lived wholly without anything to talk about, for that would be impossible. Mrs. Grundy, though quite a college widow, still has managed to exist through the winter.

Finally, there is this letter of 1 October 1869, published in the Detroit Free Press a few days later, that turns the table and casts the young student as the wronged party. It is my favorite of all these early examples. Not only does it use the term anchorite, which excites the medievalist in me, but the description of his rival for the woman’s affections as a “long-haired resident ‘lit.’” is simply delightful:

Ann Arbor is renowned not only for her natural charms and educational advantages, but also for the beauty and amiability of her fair daughters, and for their devotedness to their loves. It isn’t considered the correct thing for any young lady to accept over a dozen proposals during one winter, and it’s a breach of etiquette for her to maintain over three matrimonial engagements at one and the same time. Some of these “naughty, naughty girls” are the most “engaged” as well as the most engaging young persons that it ever was my misfortune to meet; and he must be an Anchorite indeed who can hope to resist their charms. Some one has had the malignity and ungallantry to style these young ladies “college widows,” which perhaps is no misnomer after all. Last night I went to see my college widow, the faithful young angel who during the past few months has consumed quire after quire of monogram paper in imparting to me the “inexpressible loneliness” which she experienced in my absence, and the “anxious longing” with which she looked forward to my return to the classic shades of Ann Arbor, but who I now find has been consoling herself in my absence in the delectable society of “Buggs,” a long-haired resident “lit.,” whom she knows I never could tolerate. However, not that I am enabled to look after my case in person I shall enter a “demurrer,” or demand a “nolle prosequi.” [unwillingness to continue]

Discuss this post

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Sources:

“College Widows.” Democrat and Reflector (Schenectady, New York), 21 March 1861, 2/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Flamming.” The Bomb (Middlebury College, Connecticut), 24 April 1860, 6/1. Newspapers.com. (Metadata mistakenly credits this to the Bennington Banner, Vermont.)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 11 April 2026, s.v. college, n.

“Letter from Williamstown.” Pittsfield Sun (Massachusetts), 28 May 1863, 1/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“An Old Maid’s Soliloquy.” Temperance Crusader (Penfield, Georgia), 15 March 1856, 2/3. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, March 2026, s.v. college widow, n.

“A Story about Love and a Fortune.” Springfield Daily Republican (Illinois), 2 April 1859, 6/1–2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“The Terrible Tree.” Sunbury American (Sunbury, Pennsylvania), 15 March 1856, 1/2. Newspapers.com.

“The University. A Gossipy Letter from ‘Athens’” (1 October 1869). Detroit Free Press (Michigan), 4 October 1869, 4/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

moonbat

Biho Takashi, “Bat in Moon,” woodblock print, c. 1905

24 April 2026

Moonbat is a slang term for a crazy person that suddenly rose to prominence in 2003. Like most slang terms, its origin cannot be determined with certainty, but it likely formed through a mixing of two other metaphorical terms, barking/howling at the moon and bats in the belfry.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang has a citation from Peter Buckley and Duncan Clark’s 2003 edition of The Rough Guide to the Internet. I’ve only been able to locate the 2006 edition online, but the 2003 edition likely reads identically:

Over the years, the blogging community has developed its own language of labels, jibes and compliments. If you want to know the difference between a “blawg” and a “barking moonbat” stop off at: Blog Glossary www.samizdata.net/blog/glossary.html [URL no longer active]

That same year, on 31 August, we have this in Florida’s St. Petersburg Times about a woman who volunteered as a human shield in Baghdad prior to the US war with Iraq:

On the Internet, they are calling Faith Fippinger a “treasonous hippie” and a “peacenik bitch.” A “no-good, dictator-supporting, mass-murder-abetting loser.” A “barking moonbat.”

And there is this syndicated column by James Lileks that appeared in newspapers on 23 October 2003:

So why does Bush coddle the Saudis? If you’re of the barking moonbat persuasion, the reasons are clear: Oil! Halliburton! Prescott Bush was the love slave of King Faisal in a Skull and Bones ritual!

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Benham, Kelly. “A Soft Target.” St. Petersburg Times (Florida), 31 August 2003, F1/1. ProQuest Newspapers.

Buckley, Peter and Duncan Clark. The Rough Guide to the Internet. London: Rough Guides, September 2006, 283. Archive.org.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 31 March 2026, s.v. moon, n.

Lileks, James. “Dean Tailors His Words to His Audiences.” Trenton Evening Times (New Jersey), 23 October 2003, A19/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Takashi, Biho, c. 1905. Brooklyn Museum. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

viking

28 March 2025
[Edit: 23 April 2026, added 1801 and 1816 citations]

We all have a solid idea of what a viking was, one of a band of a horned-helmeted, Old Norse warriors who ravaged northern Europe in the medieval period. And that idea is wrong. Not only did viking helmets not have horns, the Norse people who sailed about the northern world were more likely to be peaceful merchants and traders than plundering raiders and pirates. Viking was an occupation, and an occasional gig at that, not an ethnic identity. Furthermore, the word viking is really three different, albeit etymologically related, words. There is the Old English wicing, the Old Norse vikingr, and our Present-Day English word viking. Each of these has slightly different meanings and very different histories.

The Old English wicing is formed through normal derivation, wic (camp) + -ing (person). So a wicing is a person who establishes a camp, much like a pirate might on a shore they were raiding. Wicing appears in the Épinal and Erfurt glossaries, two Latin-Old English word lists. The entriy in the Épinal glossary, which dates to the first half of the eighth century, reads:

piraticum    uuicingsceadan

And the Erfurt glossary, from the late eighth or early ninth century, reads:

piraticam    uuicingsceadae

The Latin piraticum means piracy, and the Old English wicingsceada literally means viking-like. Note that the Épinal glossary predates the period of Norse raids on the English coastline that started toward the end of the eighth century. The late ninth century translation of Orosius’s history also uses wicing, but that use is in the context of Philip of Macedon (the father of Alexander the Great) raiding in the Mediterranean:

Philippuse geþuhte æfter þæm þæt he an land ne mihte þæm folce mid gifum gecweman þe him an simbel wæron mid winnende; ac he scipa gegaderode, & wicingas wurdon, & sona æt anum cirre an C & eahtatig ceapscipa gefengon.

(Philip realized that on land he could not satisfy with gifts the people who had continually been fighting alongside him, so he gathered ships and went viking, and soon captured one hundred eighty merchant ships in one engagement.)

Similarly, in the Old English poem Exodus, a poetic retelling of some chapters of that biblical book, the Israelites making the Red Sea crossing are referred to as sæwicingas, or sea-vikings:

Æfter þære fyrde    flota modgade,
Rubenes sunu.    Randas bæron
sæ-wicingas    ofer sealtne mersc,
mana menio;    micel an-getrum
eode unforht.

(After that army the sea-force, the sons of Reuben, proudly marched. The sea-vikings, many a man, bore shields across the salt marsh. The great host went unafraid.)

As is the case with most Old English poetry, we don’t know when it was composed. But note that the term sea-vikings is being used to describe a land army, presumably because they are crossing the Red Sea. Depending on when the poem was written, it could also be an allusion to Norse raiders, but that would be a strange association for an English poet to make about the Israelites.

Indeed, wicing was used more generally to mean any plunderer. For instance, Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (Sermon of the Wolf to the English), written c. 1015, uses the word to refer to an enslaved person who has escaped and become an outlaw, in a passage condemning unjust laws:

Ðeah þræla hwilc hlaforde ætleape & of cristendome to wicinge wurþe, & hit æfter þam eft gewurþe þæt wæpengewrixl wurðe gemæne þegne & þræle, gif þræl þone þæne þegen fullice afylle, licge ægilde ealre his mægðe; and gif se þegen þone þræl þe he ær ahte fullice afylle, gilde þegengilde.

(Though a slave who escapes from their lord and from Christendom to become a viking, and afterward it happens that an exchange of weapons occurs between thane and slave, if the slave should outright kill that thane, [the thane] will lie without any compensation to his family; but if the thane kills outright that slave that he had once owned, he pays the price for killing a thane.)

Although here, unlike the Exodus poem, Wulfstan is undoubtedly also alluding to Norse raiders. Sermo Lupi ad Anglos is about how the decadent English society is being punished by God, and one of those punishments is viking raids.

In his grammar, written at the end of the tenth century, about two decades before Wulfstan’s sermon, Ælfric of Eynsham also deploys the word generally, but his use probably carries an allusion to Norse raiders as well. His gloss on the Latin pirata reads:

pirata wicing oððe scegðman

(pirate: viking or shipman)

Scegð being a type of fast sailing ship used by the Scandinavians.

There is an instance in Old English poetry where wicing is used as the name of a people, that is in the poem Widsith, which consists mainly of a long list of various peoples. One passage reads thusly:

Hroþwulf ond Hroðgar    heoldon lengest
sibbe ætsomne    suhtor-fædran,
siþþan hy forwræcon    wicinga cynn
ond Ingeldes    ord forbigdan,
forheowan æt Heorote    Heaðobeardna þrym.

(Hrothwulf and Hrothgar, uncle and nephew, together held the peace the longest, since they drove away the nation of vikings and humiliated the vanguard of Ingeld, cut down the Heathobard host at Heorot.)

The people and events in the passage are also referred to in the poem Beowulf. Exactly who the wicinga cynn were is not known, but since Hrothwulf and Hrothgar were Danes, it is unlikely that they refer to a Norse people. They may be a distinct group, or the phrase may be another name for Ingeld’s people, the Heathobards. Again, we don’t know exactly who the Heathobards were either, but they perhaps came from Saxony, or perhaps they were entirely fictional.

And in the poem the Battle of Maldon, written sometime after 991 C.E., wicing is used to refer to a Norse army invading England:

Þa stod on stæðe,    stiðlice clypode
wicinga ar,    wordum mælde,
se on beot abead    brimliþendra
ærænde to þam eorle,    þær he on ofre stod.

(Then stood on the shore, a viking messenger, sternly calling out, delivering a speech, uttering a vow, the seafarers’ message to the earl, where he stood on the opposite [shore].)

So the Old English wicing was used generically to refer to raiders or pirates, people of the camps. In some of these instances, it alluded to or specifically referred to Norse raiders, but that wasn’t its primary sense. And in one instance, it was used as the name of a people, but which people is not known, although it doesn’t seem to refer to a Nordic one. So what we have is the fact that the Old English wicing originally meant simply a generic pirate.

The Old English wicing fell out of use following the Norman Conquest.

As for the Old Norse vikingr, that is only first recorded later, in the late tenth century. It is most likely a borrowing from either the English or Anglo-Frisian wicing. It could, however, have been plausibly formed within Old Norse from the root vikr, meaning bay or inlet. In that case, a vikingr would be someone who ventured forth from a coastal inlet.

As for our Present-Day English word viking, that word is a nineteenth-century borrowing from the Old Norse. We see it in a review of Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons that appeared in the Critical Review in October 1801:

We will not, however, dwell on triffling objections, but shall proceed to consider the more important parts of the work, and select a passage concerning the first appearance of the Danish pirates.

Such were the depredations by which the kings, sea kings, and vikingr of the north were distinguishing themselves in reciprocal murder and domestic ruin at the commencement of the eighth century. Like tygers in disposition, but more dreadful from their weapons, their contriving ingenuity, and the all-powerful organization of the human hand, they lived but to plunder and to massacre.

Another early appearance is in George Chalmer’s 1807 history of Scotland, Caledonia, in a passage about Torfin, grandson of King Malcom II of Scotland:

At the age of fourteen, Torfin commenced his career as a vikingr. His sails often disquieted the coasts of Scotland during the reign of his grandfather.

And we see the anglicized spelling viking in a piece in the August 1816 issue of the Scots Magazine:

In 870, the Vikings, from the Irish shores, made a formidable descent on the Western confines of Strath-Cluyd; besieged their capital, sacked it, laid waste the surrounding country, and returned the subsequent year to Dublin, with immense spoil, and many captives.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Ælfric. Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar. Julius Zupitza, ed. Berlin: Weidmannsche, 1880, 24. Archive.org.

Anlezark, Daniel, ed. Old Testament Narratives. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 7. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011, lines 331–35a, 228.

“The Battle of Maldon.” In Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record 6. New York: Columbia UP, 1942, lines 25–28, 7.

Chalmers, George. Caledonia (1807), vol. 1 of 3. Paisley, Scotland: Alexander Gardner, 1887, 341. Archive.org.

Fell, Christine. “Old English Wicing: A Question of Semantics” (13 November 1986). Proceedings of the British Academy, 72, 1986 295–316. The British Academy. 

“On the Celtic Kingdom of Strath-Cluyd, called the Regnum Cambrense, in Scotland.” Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, August 1816, 577–533 at 533/1. ProQuest Historical Periodicals.

Orosius. The Old English History of the World. Malcolm Godden, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 3.7, 172.

Oxford English Dicitionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. viking, n.

Pheifer, J. D. Old English Glosses in the Épinal-Erfurt Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, 39.

“The Second Part of the History of the Anglo-Saxons.” Critical Review, October 1801, vol. 33. London: S. Hamilton, 1801, 121–34 at 124. Google Books.

Shapiro, Fred. “Antedating of ‘Viking.’ ADS-L, 22 April 2026.

“Widsith.” In Robert E. Bjork, ed. Old English Shorter Poems; Vol. II: Wisdom and Lyric. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 32, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2014, lines 45–49, 46.

Wulfstan. “Sermo lupi ad Anglos.” In Dorothy Bethurum, ed. The Homilies of Wulfstan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, 261–66 at 263–64.

Photo credit: Adolph Edward Weidhaas, 1936. Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

incumbent

22 April 2026

Today we usually find the word incumbent in the context of politics, referring to the current holder of a political office. But English use of the word was originally in the sense of the holder of an ecclesiastical office.

Incumbent comes from the medieval Latin incumbere, meaning to settle on, to sit or lie on, but it  was also used figuratively to mean to occupy a religious office or benefice. The earliest use of the word in English that I’m aware of is in one particular manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, London, British Library, Harley MS 7334, copied c. 1410. It appears near the beginning of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, where Chaucer is likening the mendicant friars of his day to the elves and fairies who supposedly used to wander the land:

For þer as wont was to walken an elf
Ther walkith noon . but þe lymytour himself
In vndermeles and in morwenynges
And saith his matyns and his holy þinges
As he goþ in his lymytacioun
wommen may saufly vp and doun
In euery bussch or vnder euery tre
Þer is non oþer incumbent but he
And ne wol but doon hem dishonour

(For where an elf was wont to walk
There walks no one but the mendicant friar himself
In late mornings and in early mornings,
And says his morning prayers and holy things
As he goes in his assigned district.
Women may go safely up and down.
In every bush and under every tree
There is no other incumbent but he
And he will do them no harm but dishonor.)

Most manuscripts of the Tales, including the Ellesmere and Hengist manuscripts which are considered the most authoritative, do not have this reading. Those manuscripts have incubus where this one has incumbent. And given the passage’s allusions to elves and fairies, incubus would indeed seem to be Chaucer’s original, but this manuscript does provide evidence of the use of incumbent.

We see the usual use of incumbent, referring to the holder of an ecclesiastical office, in a letter, written in 1424 or earlier, by John Hurlegh to Thomas Stoner:

I am enfourmed þat Osebarn and Cassy have pursued a new writ of quare impedit aȝeyns J. Golafre. J. Warfeld, and þe incumbent.

A writ of quare impedit (literally, why does he hinder) was an English a common law action requesting the court resolve a disputed benefice, typically brought against a bishop who has appointed someone else to the post.

And by the latter half of the seventeenth century we see incumbent used to refer to secular political offices. Here is an example from Andrew Marvell’s 1672 The Rehearsal Transpros’d, in which he refers to kings as incumbent stewards of their kingdoms:

For these Kings, Mr. Bayes, how negligent soever or ignorant you take'm to be, have, I doubt, a shrewd understanding with them. ’Tis a Trade, that God be thanked, neither you nor I are of, and therefore we are not so competent Judges of their Actions. I my self have oftentimes seen them, some of them, do strange things, and unreasonable in my opinion, and yet a little while, or sometimes many years after, I have sound that all the men in the world could not have contrived any thing better. ’Tis not with them as with you. You have but one Cure of Souls, or perhaps two, as being a Noblemans Chaplain, to look after: And if you make Conscience of discharging them as you ought, you would find you had work sufficient, without writing your Ecclesiastical Policies. But they are the Incumbents of whole Kingdoms, and the Rectorship of the Common people, the Nobility, and even of the Clergy, whom you are prone to affirm when possest with principles that incline to rebellion and disloyal parctices, to be of all Rebels the most dangerous, p. 49, the care I say of all these, rests upon them.

From there it is an easy jump to democratically elected political office and the sense we know today.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” In The Harleian MS 7334 of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed. The Chaucer Society. London: N. Trübner, 1885, lines 3:873–81, 219. London, British Library, Harley MS 7334, fol. 97v. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. incumbere, v. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Hurlegh, John. “Letter to Thomas Stoner” (28 September 1424, or earlier). The Stoner Letters and Papers, 1290–1483, vol. 1. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, ed. London: Royal Historical Society, 1919, 35. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Marvell, Andrew. The Rehearsal Transpros’d, second edition. London: A.B., 1672, 134. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 31 January 2026, s.v. incumbent, n.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1900, s.v. incumbent, n., incumbent, adj.

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