A Word From ...

Medalling in the Language

'That athlete is hoping to meddle', I heard a commentator remark at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. 'Meddle in what', I thought. What would an athlete gain by interfering when the starting gun was about to fire? Of course what the commentator really meant was that the athlete was 'hoping to medal' - that is to win a medal.

Lexicographers are always looking for new words or older words used in new ways. Was 'to medal' a new use of the noun, I wondered, and where did the word 'medal' come from?

Medal is derived from the Latin word medalia, the name of a half-denarius coin. The word only arrived in English in the mid 16th century, having passed through Italian (medaglia) and French (medaille) on its way. The Italian word gained a new meaning after the conquest of Padua in 1390 by Francesco da Canosa, when the first commemorative medals (as distinct from coins) were made.

By the mid 18th century the word had acquired its modern meanings of an award given for bravery or for success in a competition. By 1822 Lord Byron was writing to Sir Walter Scott to describe a brawl with a man whom he had mistaken for an officer, 'as he was medalled and well mounted, etc.'.

It was the 1970s that brought us the new form, 'to medal'. It originated in American English which has a long record of turning nouns into verbs: for example, cache (a hidden storage place) became to cache (to store in secret) way back in the early 19th century; to lobby (solicit votes) came into the language in 1850; and to chicken out is first recorded in 1943.

New words and meanings enter the English language all the time. It's thanks to people 'meddling' in the language that we now have people 'medalling' in the language!