This week, the Christian Fiction Scavenger Hunt will once more take to the web to bring you a weekend of fun and discovery! I’ll be participating again, giving away a copy of The Collector of Burned Books (or any of my books, your choice), as well as participating in the Grand Prize. Keep an eye out for it to go live on Thursday afternoon!
And of course, thinking of the Hunt inspired me to look up the word scavenger, and wow! I had no idea where this one came from!
So scavenger dates from the late 1300s, when it was–get this–an official title for a London tax collector, specifically one charged with collecting tax on goods sold by foreign merchants. Its root word means “to inspect.”
Around 1540, the word had, er, gotten a downgrade. Instead of a tax collector, a scavenger was instead charged with collecting refuse from those London streets (ewwww). Though in the 1600s, it took on a bit more dignity again–it was the person in charge of inspection and maintenance of the streets. But it is definitely this idea of “the one who collects rubbish” that led to the current meaning of “someone who collects (and consumes, in the animal sense) what’s been scattered or discarded.”
The verb, scavenge, is actually a back-formation of the noun.
Word Nerds Unite!
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 
