What is the origin of "acorn"? [closed]
I am from the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, and this popped into my head today. Is the word acorn (the nut of an oak tree) in any way related to the Dutch word for squirrel, eekhoorn, the animal that collects acorns for food?
Looking at eekhoorn, one will have a hard time finding any logical meaning to the naming of this animal. There's eek, which is not a Dutch word, and hoorn which means horn. So it doesn't make much sense. But the pronunciation even in Dutch/Flemish is remarkably equal to the English acorn.
Since many words have migrated country borders (like the NL bolwerk and EN bulwark), I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same with acorn/eekhoorn, except for the fact that eekhoorn is the actual animal that consumes the acorns. That would make it pretty unique, I think.
By the way, acorn in Dutch is eikel, having different connotations which I won't explain here.
Solution 1:
This is actually an interesting question. The OED provides this tale:
Etymology: The formal history of this word has been much perverted by ‘popular etymology.’ OE. æcern neut., pl. æcernu, is cogn. w. ONor. akarn neut. (Dan. agern, Norw. aakorn), Dutch aker ‘acorn,’ OHG. ackeran masc. and neut. (mod.G. ecker, pl. eckern) ‘oak or beech mast,’ Goth. akran ‘fruit,’ prob. a deriv. of Goth. akr-s, ONor. akr, OE. æcer ‘field,’ orig. ‘open unenclosed country, the plain.’
Hence akran appears to have been originally ‘fruit of the unenclosed land, natural produce of the forest,’ mast of oak, beech, etc., as in HG., extended in Gothic to ‘fruit’ generally, and gradually confined in Low G., Scand., and Eng., to the most important forest produce, the mast of the oak. (See Grimm, under Ackeran and Ecker.) In Ælfric’s Genesis xliv. 11, it had perhaps still the wider sense, a reminiscence of which also remains in the ME. akernes of okes.
Along with this restriction of application, there arose a tendency to find in the name some connexion with oak, OE. ác, north. ake, aik. Hence the 15th and 16th c. refashionings ake-corn, oke-corn, ake-horn, oke-horn, with many pseudo-etymological and imperfectly phonetic variants. Of these the 17th c. literary acron seems to simulate the Gr. ἄκρον top, point, peak.
The normal mod. repr. of OE. æcern would be akern, akren, or ? atchern as already in 4; the actual acorn is due to the 16th c. fancy that the word corn formed part of the name.