- down
- \ \ Effectively, English now has three distinct words down, but two of them are intimately related: for down ‘to or at a lower place’ [11] originally meant ‘from the hill’ – and the Old English word for hill in this instance was dūn.\ \ This may have been borrowed from an unrecorded Celtic word which some have viewed as the ultimate source also of dune [18] (borrowed by English from Middle Dutch dūne) and even of town. Its usage is now largely restricted to the plural form, used as a geographical term for various ranges of hills (the application to the North and South Downs in southern England dates from at least the 15th century).\ \ The Old English phrase of dūne ‘from the hill’ had by the 10th century become merged into a single word, adūne, and broadened out semantically to ‘to a lower place, down’, and in the 11th century it started to lose its first syllable – hence down. Its use as a preposition dates from the 16th century. (The history of down is closely paralleled in that of French à val, literally ‘to the valley’, which also came to be used for ‘down’; it is the source of French avaler ‘descend, swallow’, which played a part in the development of avalanche.) Down ‘feathers’ [14] was borrowed from Old Norse dúnn.\ \ Cf.⇒ DUNE
Word origins - 2ed. J. Ayto. 2005.
