The Etymology of English big

No convincing or satisfactory etymology has as yet been suggested for the English word big. Skeat properly compares it with the Norwegian bugge ‘strong man’ and says that it is probably a borrowing from Scandinavian. He further hazards a connection with NE bow, Goth, biugan, from PG *beugan, and there lets the matter rest. Webster's New International Dictionary connects it with bug and Puck, originally ‘hobgoblin, spectre’, and suggests a further relation with Lat. boccae ‘puffed cheeks’. But phonetic difficulties, to say the least, are at once apparent. The word bug is undoubtedly borrowed from the grotesque fancies of Celtic folklore; cf. Welsh bwg ‘hobgoblin’: Lith. búgti, baugùs ‘terrify(ing)’, Skt. bhujati ‘turn aside’, Gk. φ∈ὐγω , Lat. fugio ‘flee’, all from IE *bheug-. If big is from the Norse it must have a Germanic inheritance and could not be related to the IE root *bheug- at all. Puck, < ME pouke < OE pūca : ON pūki, is equally bad, if not worse. Nor is the semantic connection all that could be desired. Middle English (big has no Anglo-Saxon antecedent) big, bigge, bygly mean ‘large, rich, mightily’, and the Scandinavian bugge means, as we have seen above, ‘a strong or important man’. It is a far cry from ‘imp, hobgoblin’ to the conception of largeness, might, and wealth. Der Tag of proletarian ideologies had not yet arrived

Etymology · Linguistics · History · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy