The noun filet first emerged in the early fourteenth century. For a while, there were a bunch of accepted spellings, including felet, fyllet, filett, and fillit, but around the time when the word was verbified at the start of the seventeenth century the most common forms were narrowed down to fillet and filet. It comes from the Middle French word filet, which had the rather interesting definition of "ribbon". The connection there is that early styles of the dish were prepared by being tied with a string. Further back, we can trace it to Latin filum, which meant "thread", and that traces to a Proto-Indo-European word sounding like gwhi and with the same meaning. This makes fillet related tot he words file and profile, but those are stories for another time.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy philosophy, trivia, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
Archives
May 2022
TAGS |