October has arrived, which means it’s finally possible to walk to class without boiling alive, and the over-12,000 trees that dot the campus are transforming into brilliant shades of yellow, orange and red. Fall is a beautiful time at The University of Alabama.
But why do we call this season fall? And why is it also called autumn?
Answering these questions requires reflecting on the over-600 year history of the English language and its strange development.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first attributed use of “autumn” was circa 1400 by famed poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Fall was first used in the sense of “autumn” a century and a half later, in 1550, but its seasonal definition was not formally entered into a dictionary until 1755.
As the British Empire expanded in the 1600s, the English language spread to the New World. Decreased contact between English speakers on either side of the Atlantic promoted linguistic divergence, causing an “autumn” and “fall” divide.
Fall has become more widely used in American English, while the British have stuck to autumn. The reasons for American English speakers’ preference for “fall” are unclear.
“Some think that it [fall] sounds more simple and honest and rustic, unlike the more formal ‘autumn,’” said Tony Thorne, a British linguist and lexicographer, to USA Today. “Some think that independent Americans wanted to consciously distance themselves from Colonial British ways of speaking.”
“Fall” certainly has an earthier ring to it than the Latinate “autumn,” and its origin is simpler, too.
The term “fall” comes from the earlier phrase “fall of the leaf,” complement to its seasonal opposite, the “spring of the leaf.” Americans call it fall because that’s what happens – the leaves fall.
Autumn, on the other hand, is of obscure origin. The word is borrowed from the Old French “automne,” which itself is borrowed from the Latin “autumnus,” but the origin of the Latin word and its meaning are unknown.
Perhaps it is fitting that the etymology of the “season of mists,” as John Keats put it in his poem “To Autumn,” would be shrouded in mystery.
English is not alone in its nebulous linguistic relationship to this season. Indo-European languages vary greatly in the words they use for fall, suggesting that there may never have been a single common proto-Indo-European word.
The original word for fall in Old English was “hærfest,” cognate with the German “Herbst” and modern English “harvest.” These words define fall by its associated agricultural activity.
The Latvian “rudens” and Lithuanian “ruduo” come from the same stem meaning “reddish,” describing the color of the leaves.
Other languages express fall in terms of its relationship to summer or winter, defining the season by what it is not. The Czech word “podzim” means “under winter,” and the Greek “phthinóporo” means “waning of summer.”
As a transitional phase between the extremes of summer and winter, fall is a liminal period that can be easier to understand in terms of its boundaries.
Fall was the last season to be lexicalized, or represented by a certain word rather than descriptive phrases, in the English language, and it is the only season to have more than one widely used name.
A sense of transition still lingers in the ambiguity of the season’s name. Whether we call it fall or autumn, this season is about change — the changing of temperature, leaves and length of day, but also the ever-changing nature of language itself.
The Crimson White Copy Desk consists of Chief Copy Editor Luke McClinton and Assistant Copy Editors Lauren Chumbley and Rachel Talley.
