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BRIEF MERRIMENT

12/24/2017

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The etymology of the word merry underwent a myriad of changes in Middle and Old English, undergoing alterations such as merrie, mery, merie, mirie, myrie, murie, merige, myrige, mirige, myrege, and... you get the idea. Clearly the word was used a lot back then; indeed, N-grams show it being most commonly used in the 1600s. Anyway, through all this time, it still meant "jolly" or "pleasant", but as we move further back to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic root murguz, it meant something more like "brief" or "short". This transition highlights the quality of happy moments to be fleeting, or of merry moments to be short. The final root to be reconstructed is that of the Proto-Indo-European mreg, meaning "short", the root of words from brevity to mirth. Going further back than that is impossible, but on a more recent and unsurprising note, Google search interest for the word "merry" skyrockets every December.
1 Comment
Mehdi link
2/19/2022 11:59:47 pm

Many years ago I came across an old book in which Merry was claimed to have an indo.european root Nmreghu meaning dying, weak, having short life, etc. Can anybody help me to recall the author and the title of that (dictionary) book?
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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic. I have a linguistics degree from Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote my thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy traveling, trivia, philosophy, board games, conlanging, and art history. 

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