glass

\ \ [OE] The making of glass goes back to ancient Egyptian times, and so most of the words for it in the various Indo-European languages are of considerable antiquity. In those days, it was far easier to make coloured glass than the familiar clear glass of today. In particular, Roman glass was standardly bluish-green, and many words for ‘glass’ originated in colour terms signifying ‘blue’ or ‘green’. In the case of glass, its distant ancestor was Indo-European *gel- or *ghel-, which produced a host of colour adjectives ranging in application from ‘grey’ through ‘blue’ and ‘green’ to ‘yellow’. Among its descendants was West Germanic *glasam, which gave German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish glas and English glass. A secondary semantic development of the word’s base, glass being a shiny substance, was ‘shine, gleam’; this probably lies behind English glare [13], whose primary sense is ‘shine dazzlingly’ (the change of s to r is a well-known phonetic phenomenon, termed ‘rhoticization’). Irish gloine ‘glass’ also comes from Indo-European *g(h)el-, and French verre and Italian vetro ‘glass’ go back to Latin vitrum ‘glass’ (source of English vitreous), which also meant ‘woad’, a plant which gives a blue dye.

\ \ The use of the plural glasses for ‘spectacles’ dates from the mid-17th century. The verb glaze [14] is an English derivative of glass.

\ \ Cf.⇒ GLAZE