Are "ball" (formal event) and "ball" (sphere for playing with) etymologically related? [closed]

This is a ball:

^source

But so is this:

^source

Why do we use the same word for a formal social gathering with dancing and a round toy for throwing and catching?

Is there some kind of shared origin? If so, how did the word come to be used for such different things?

Or do the two similar-looking words actually come from different etymological roots?

Solution 1:

Ball as in 'sphere' comes from Norse 'bǫllr' /bɔlːr/, while ball as in 'dance party' comes from Latin 'ballare', which in turn became 'bal' (French for 'a dance'). Totally different roots, it's just one of those quirks of English having absorbed bits of so many different languages.

Edit as requested to provide a bit more detail: 'Ball' meaning 'sphere' turned up as we know it in Middle English, so sometime after the Norman conquest of Britain - though not from the French influence on the language (which is generally thought to have had a bigger impact on 'high' society's language, which is why so many words for things like politics and the legal system are borrowed from old French or Latin, and indeed the word 'ball' as in 'dance party'). I've not found anything to predate bǫllr from a quick bit of research, but we probably obtained that sometime after the Viking invasion. Bǫllr itself comes from the proto-Indo-European word 'bole', meaning 'inflate' or 'swell'.

During the Middle English era a lot of words with their roots in Germanic languages became a bit more simplified (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_phonology) so the trailing 'r', that was likely pronounced like an extraneous vowel on the end (think of things like 'olde worlde'), so we would end up with something that sounded a lot more like 'ball' - and eventually spelling was standardised a great deal more than it had before.

Ball as in 'dance party' could actually be traced back before Latin, to the Greek root 'ball' meaning 'to throw', like in the word 'ballistics' or the siege weapon 'ballista' - the Greek word meaning 'dance' it came from is 'ballizein': literally 'to throw your body' (think of your stereotypical Greek wedding and imagine how lively the dancing is!). Latin is the root of romance languages, including French, so it would've been loaned from there but I couldn't tell you a great deal about the changes in French I'm afraid. We definitely would have inherited the word into early Middle English following the Norman Conquest, though, since it's exactly the sort of thing that would apply to high society parties amongst the new nobility.

So yeah, it's pure coincidence that we use the same word for the two things; the words literally come from opposite ends of Europe, though they arrived in English within a couple of hundred years of each other as Britain repeatedly got its butt kicked by invaders!

Here's a good source for this sort of thing: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ball