Autumn was once called “harvest.”
As beloved as the crisp fall weather seems to be, English speakers haven’t always paid attention to it … at least not linguistically. Historically, the more extreme seasons have always been named — specifically winter, which was so important that it was used to mark the passage of time by the Anglo-Saxons, who counted their years in winters. But when English speakers of the past referred to summer’s end, they often used the term “harvest,” from the Old English (and ultimately Germanic) haerfest. The first recorded usage of “harvest” to mean a season appears in the 10th century, but the word didn’t stick around in common usage (it was considered outdated by the 1700s). It could be that it was just too confusing a term, considering it was used for both the time of year and the task of plucking crops from trees and fields.
Eventually, the English language began recognizing the transitional seasons. Spring was first known as “lent” or “lenten” in the 12th and 13th centuries, then “spryngyng time,” among other terms, around the 14th century. “Autumn” emerged around the 1300s, taken from the Latin autumnus and French autompne, and slowly pushing out “harvest.” “Fall” cropped up around the 1500s as part of “fall of the leaf,” mirroring the popular phrase “spring of the leaf” used for the vernal equinox, and it’s likely that these phrases were simply shortened to give the seasons their modern names. “Autumn” and “fall” have been used interchangeably ever since, with their popularity waxing and waning over time, though English speakers today primarily use one or the other based on their homeland. “Autumn” reigns supreme in the U.K., while most Americans typically use “fall.” The vocabulary variation harkens back to the Revolutionary period, when disgruntled colonists attempted to split both governmentally and culturally from the British, in part by modifying their speech. Less than 100 years after the U.S. declared independence, “fall” was considered an entirely American word, used in a young country that would go on to establish its own season-defining traditions, such as trick-or-treating and Thanksgiving dinners.
Dictionaries were once popular graduation gifts and required purchases for college students, but the first English-only compendium wasn’t nearly as large as modern tomes. Lexicographer Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, featured around 3,000 words with brief descriptions of their meanings on 130 pages — and unlike more recent dictionaries, it didn’t contain commonly used words. Instead, Cawdrey’s text listed difficult, unusual words that had crept into English thanks to a wave of literary, scientific, and artistic advances during the 1500s. (Many, like “ocean” or “hazard,” we wouldn’t think of as particularly challenging today.) Table Alphabeticall’s limited focus is often why its historical significance is overshadowed by Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language — an important language contribution that attempted to standardize the spelling of everyday words for the first time, but wouldn’t go to press until 1775.
