Word of the Week – Bee

Did you know that one of the oldest words we have is…bee?

Yep. Bee.

Our English word traces all the way back to Old English, but it doesn’t stop there. The Old English traced it to Proto-Germanic (remember that “proto” means “first”) and that Proto-Germanic traced to Proto-Indo-European. Which is to say, the oldest language we have records of. According to a recent feature on NPR, bee is in fact a prehistoric word.

The amazing thing here is that the word hasn’t changed in all those many years. The spelling was originally beo, but it was still pronounced “bee.”

And with a word this old, it’s no surprise that the metaphorical senses have quite a history too. Bee has been used to denote any “busy worker” since the 1530s. And predating that by about twenty years is a Scottish saying of someone having a “head full of bees” when they were a bit mad, which is probably where the later (1825) “to have a bee in one’s bonnet” comes from.

So what about things like quilting bee and spelling bee? These communal, collective activities date from the 1820s and 1880s, respectively, but bee being used to describe other such activities is actually from 1769. Some of the earliest uses were of raising-bee for building construction, logging-bee for log-rolling, paring-bee for paring apples during harvest, and husking bee for corn.

Bees are certainly fascinating creatures! And humans have been keeping them–and using that same word to name them–pretty much since the dawn of time. 

Word Nerds Merch!