Hooked

In which an anchor, an ankle, an angler, and the whole of England turn out to be one and the same bend.

The anchor is one of those objects that has never had to try very hard. It is heavy, it is curved, and it sits at the bottom of the sea holding things in place, which is more than can be said for most of us. Its name has been equally unambitious: English took anchor from Latin ancora, and Latin borrowed it from Greek ἄγκυρα (ánkyra).

Behind it lies a Proto-Indo-European root meaning, quite simply, “to bend.” An anchor, in other words, is a crook: a bent thing that catches on the seabed. The same root turns up in a surprising number of places, most of them considerably drier.

A root with moods

Proto-Indo-European roots were temperamental about their vowels. Depending on circumstance, a root might appear with an e, with an o, or with no vowel at all. This is called ablaut, and English still does it every time someone sings, sang, or has sung. Our root behaves the same way: h₂enk-, h₂onk-, h₂n̥k-. The h₂ at the front is a laryngeal, a sound long since lost, though not before it had tinted its neighbouring e into an a. Hence the ank- and ang- we shall keep meeting.

The o-grade, incidentally, gave Latin uncus, “a hook,” which survives in the anatomist’s uncinate and in very little else. It is the same root, merely wearing its other vowel.

The anchor’s h

Old English had ancor, plainly enough. The h arrived in the sixteenth century, when scholars, suspecting the word of being more Greek than it was, inserted one out of sheer erudition. It has never been pronounced, and survives purely as a monument to Renaissance overconfidence.

Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, is named with admirable modesty after the place where ships dropped anchor. The anchorite, on the other hand, a hermit walled up in a cell, has nothing to do with any of this. He comes from Greek anachōrein, “to withdraw,” and owes his resemblance to the anchor entirely to coincidence, though one can see why the idea of a man permanently moored to one spot might have encouraged the confusion.

Bends in the body

The ankle is, as one might expect, the place where the leg bends. Greek, more ambitious, applied the root to the elbow: ankōn. Architects borrowed the word, and the scroll-like brackets that prop up a cornice are still called ancones, which is to say “elbows.”

Angles and anglers

Latin angulus, “a corner,” is literally the point at which a line bends, and gives us the geometer’s angle. English also has a second, entirely native angle: an old word for a fishhook. It survives in angling, and in the anglerfish, which dangles its own bait from its forehead. The two angles are cousins who happened to meet in the same dictionary and have been politely ignoring each other ever since.

A nation named after a fishhook

And so to England, the land of the Angles. They came from Angeln, a small peninsula in Schleswig, whose name is traditionally explained as “the hook,” after the curve of its coast, or else as “the narrows.” Either way, it comes from the same bending root, which makes England, at some remove, a nation named after a fishhook. For a people so devoted to sitting on riverbanks with a rod, this seems only fitting.

The Angles have, of course, been mistaken for something grander before. Bede tells how Pope Gregory the Great, seeing fair-haired boys for sale in the Roman market and learning that they were Angles, declared them non Angli, sed angeli: “not Angles, but angels.” The pun is very good. The etymology is not: angel comes from Greek angelos, “messenger,” and has no connection whatever with bending, hooks, or the coast of Schleswig.

An eastern detour

The Slavs inherited the root too, but did something characteristically inventive with it: they let the n dissolve into a nasal vowel, which Russian later lost altogether. Russian ugol, “corner,” is therefore the very same word as angle, and pauk, “spider,” is thought to mean “the bandy-legged one.” Russian yakor’, “anchor,” however, is no native but an import from the Vikings, who had already swallowed the n themselves: Old Norse akkeri.

A legend to finish

Ankara, the capital of Türkiye, was known in antiquity as Ἄγκυρα, which is to say “anchor.” Pausanias records the local explanation: King Midas found an anchor on the spot and founded a city to commemorate the discovery. That Ankara stands in the middle of the Anatolian plateau, a very long way from anything an anchor might be useful for, seems to have troubled nobody. Scholarship declines to endorse the story, but it is far too good to leave out.

In sum

One Indo-European bend gave us the anchor, the ankle, the angle, the angler, and England itself. It was falsely claimed by a hermit and an angel, and, if the ancients are to be believed, it named the capital of Türkiye into the bargain.