drill

\ \ English has no fewer than four separate words drill, all of them comparatively recent acquisitions. Drill ‘make a hole’ [16] was borrowed from Middle Dutch drillen, but beyond that is history is obscure. The word’s military application, to ‘repetitive training’, dates from earliest times, and also existed in the Dutch verb in the 16th century; it seems to have originated as a metaphorical extension of the notion of ‘turning round’ – that is, of troops marching around in circles. Drill ‘small furrow for sowing seeds’ [18] may come from the now obsolete noun drill ‘rivulet’, but the origins of this are purely conjectural: some have linked it with the obsolete verb drill ‘trickle’. Drill ‘strong fabric’ [18] gets its name from originally being woven from three threads. An earlier form of the word was drilling, an adaptation of German drillich; this in turn was descended from Latin trilix, a compound formed from tri- ‘three’ and līcium ‘thread’ (trellis is a doublet, coming ultimately from the same Latin source). (Cloth woven from two threads, incidentally, is twill [14], or alternatively – from Greek dímitos – dimity [15].) Drill ‘African baboon’ [17] comes from a West African word. It occurs also in the compound mondrill [18], the name of a related baboon, which appears to have been formed with English man.

\ \ Cf.⇒ TRELLIS; MANDRILL