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As an etymological Christmas gift from me for 2023, here’s a quick dive into the story and connections of one festive word: the humble Christmas tree.
Now, Modern English tree goes back to Old English trēow, which could mean a specific tree or the substance of wood.
… Ġeseah iċ wuldres trēow,
‘I saw the tree of glory, honoured with garments, shining with joys, adorned with gold; gems had worthily covered the Lord’s tree’
wǣdum ġeweorðode, wynnum sċīnan,
ġeġyred mid golde; ġimmas hæfdon
bewriġene weorðlīċe Wealdendes trēow.
Old English. The Dream of the Rood 14-17.
English tree has clear cognates in other Germanic languages today, such as Icelandic tré and the two Swedish words träd ‘tree’ and trä ‘wood’. In English’s closer cousins though, German and Dutch, their equivalent tree-word has lost out to Baum and boom – for which English has beam. On the basis of both their appearance and meaning, the English words tar, trough and tray look like three further possible sprouts off the same root, the first word being a substance obtainable from wood, the latter two being objects perhaps originally made of wood.
To find connections beyond the Germanic languages, we need to undo the effects of Grimm’s law, which shifted an original *d sound into a Germanic *t. With this in mind, we find recognisibly related tree-words across the many branches of the Indo-European family, which begin with the sound /d/. For example, in the Celtic languages, Irish has the word dair, while Welsh has dâr and derwen, all meaning ‘oak tree’.
Is clí darach Moysi isin tegdais
‘Moses is a pillar of oak in the house’
Old Irish. Wb. 33a5.
Moreover, Czech, a Slavic language, has dřevo ‘wood’. Albanian has dru ‘wood, tree’. Persian has dâr ‘tree, wood’ and also deraxt ‘tree’. Sanskrit has the words dā́ru ‘wood’ and drú ‘wood’.
Táṁ vo víṁ ná dru-ṣádaṁ devám…
‘That god of yours, bird-like, sitting in a tree…’
Sanskrit. Rigveda 10.115.3.
Ancient Greek, a language with a considerable legacy in English, also has more than one tree-word containing the consonants /d/ and /r/. We find dóru ‘tree, plank’ and drûs ‘tree, oak’.
… epeì oú pō toĩon anḗluthen ek dóru gaíēs.
‘Since such a tree had not yet grown up from the earth’
Ancient Greek. Odyssey 6.167.
The second word, drûs, was recognised by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder as being connected to druid. This links nicely back to the Celtic languages!
Moreover, Ancient Greek has déndron ‘tree’, the source of technical words like dendrochronology. This word is quite etymologically mysterious though – if déndron is related to the rest of the word family, then its derivational journey seems to have involved the ‘doubling’ of the original root, to get the two Ds. Reduplication is nothing too unusual in Indo-European languages, but what purpose it served here is unclear.
All in all, the many cousins of tree suggest an ancient ancestry, going all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, in which *dóru was likely the usual noun for ‘tree’. However, there are further connections to be made. There is a well-established idea that *dóru was either derived from or somehow related to a root meaning ‘firm, strong’. For the late, great Indo-Europeanist Calvert Watkins¹ at least, this connection was very natural.
“The general term for tree and wood was deru. The original meaning of the root was doubtless “to be firm, solid” … Note that the semantic evolution has here been from the general to the particular, from “solid” to “tree” (and even “oak” in some dialects).”
Watkins, 1985: xix-xx
This idea is based on words that have a similar appearance to the tree-words, with the same two consonants again. These include droón ‘strong, powerful’, an Ancient Greek hapax legomenon found in Hesychius’ lexicon. The association between firmness and trees does seem very, well, firm. In the Celtic languages, the same root produced both the Welsh word derw ‘oaks’ and the Irish word dearbh ‘sure, certain’. Latin dūrus ‘hard’ is another possible cognate – and therefore (maybe) English words like endure and durable.
On this basis, a connection can be made between tree and another common word in English, one which again shows the *d > *t change typical of Germanic vocabulary: true. An older sense of ‘firm, strong, steadfast’ for true fits with what we can see in the historical record. In Old English, the adjective trēowe means ‘loyal, faithful’. This meaning still endures today in English in uses like ‘true to his word‘, and in the German word treu. The Old English adjective for ‘correct, real’ instead was sōþ, as in a soothsayer.
If this tree–true link holds, then it opens up a whole other word family in English. There’s truth of course, but also trust, betrothal (promising faithfulness to someone else) and even truce.
In Old English, trēowa were assurances and promises (plural) of certain conduct, such as a cessation of hostilities. This plural usage continued into Middle English and became the norm. Consequently, triwes came to be interpreted as singular. This is to say, the /s/ of truce is an old plural -s ending! This act of peace and good will, with famous historical examples, seems a fitting word to end this journey on, since we’ve now travelled etymologically between two Christmassy cognates, from tree to truce.
So, while you’re gathering around a Christmas tree this year, take a second to ponder the incredible word connections of your arboreal adornment. They’re keepers of so much linguistic history and etymological delights, not just presents.
If you celebrate it, I wish you a wonderful Christmas. If you don’t, I wish you a December no less lovely.
END
Footnote
- This October in Los Angeles, I got to visit Calvert Watkins’s old study. It was awesome.
References and Resources
- Beekes, R. (2009). Etymological Dictionary of Greek (2 vols.). Brill.
- Benveniste, É. (1969). Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes 1: Économie, parenté, société. Éd. de Minuit.
- Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary online
- Friedrich, P. (1970). Proto-Indo-European Trees: The arboreal system of a prehistoric people. University of Chicago Press
- Kroonen, G. (2013). Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic. Brill.
- Matasovic, R. (2008). Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic. Brill.
- Oxford English Dictionary
- Watkins, C. (1985). The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Cover image from here.
For more Christmassy content from me, take a look here.
Danny L. Bate 
Excellent, as always.
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Fascinating stuff, Danny. I enjoy these researches myself. Perhaps you’d like to check out my investigation of the English “Noel” and its journey to English from Latin via French on my blog, Let Ancient Voices Speak. Here’s a link to the post: https://letancientvoicesspeak.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/noel-noel-natalis/
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