# Folk Etymology **Domain:** Linguistics / Language Change **Doc Type:** Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Folk etymology** is the reshaping of an unfamiliar word to resemble familiar ones, guided by a guess about its origin. Old English *brȳdguma* ("bride-man") became *bridegroom* once *guma* fell out of use and *groom* seemed to fit; *asparagus* was long popularly called "sparrowgrass." Folk etymology shows speakers actively hearing meaning in sound. The same instinct drives the [[wiki/Green Language|Green Language]], though folk etymology changes the word itself, while the Green Language reads new meaning into a word that stays the same. ## Relationships - **Related practices:** [[wiki/Green Language|Green Language]] · [[wiki/Paronomasia|Paronomasia]]. - **Field:** [[wiki/Etymology|Etymology]]. - **Practice:** [[wiki/Phonetic Etymology|Phonetic Etymology]]. - **Corpus project:** [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]], Bryant McGill's symbolic language engine, built from 1994 into the mid-2000s, with its phonological engine, sound indexes, and lexical knowledge graph. ## Sources - *Oxford English Dictionary*, entry "bridegroom, n." ## See Also [[wiki/Etymology|Etymology]] · [[wiki/Sound Change|Sound Change]]