Tag Archives: foreign languages/linguistics

“train [ME] Before railways were invented in the early 19^th century, train followed a different track. Early senses included ‘a trailing part of a robe’ and ‘a retinue,’ which gave rise to a ‘a line of travelling people or vehicles,’ and later ‘a connected series of things,’ as in train of thought. To train could mean ‘to cause a plant to grow in a desired shape,’ which was the basis of the sense ‘to instruct.’ The word is from Latin trahere ‘to pull, draw,’ and so is related to a word such as trace [ME] originally a path someone is drawn along, trail [ME] originally in the sense ‘to tow,’ tractor [L18th] ‘something that pulls,’ contract [ME] ‘draw together,’ and extract [LME] ‘draw out.’ Boys in particular have practiced the hobby of trainspotting under that name since the late 1950s. Others ridicule this hobby and in Britain in the 1980s trainspotter, like anorak, became a derogatory term for an obsessive follower of any minority interest. Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting gave a high profile to the term. The title refers to an episode in which two heroin addicts go to a disused railway station in Edinburgh and meet an old drunk who asks them if they are trainspotting. There are also overtones from the language of drugs—track is an addicts term for vein, mainlining [1930s] for injecting a drug intravenously, and train for a drug dealer. Trainers were originally training shoes, soft shoes without spikes or studs worn by athletes or sports players for training rather than the sport itself. The short form began to replace the longer one in the late 1970s.”

Excerpted from: Creswell, Julia. Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.