Marry, sir

I went to see Shakespeare's As You Like It at the Globe on Sunday and within the first few lines there were a couple of instances of 'Marry, sir'.

 

'Marry' was an interjection used to express surprise or outrage, or to add emphasis to one's words. It is a variant of the proper name, Mary. It is the Virgin Mary who is being invoked when someone says 'marry'.

Comments

[john]

Given the "surprise, outrage" connotation, how then did we make the leap to marry equating to "wed"?

[Virtual Linguist]

Thanks, John. The two senses of marry have completely different origins and histories. Marry, meaning wed, came into English from French after the Norman invasion. Before that, wed was more common, and the OED notes that 'marry' was still quite rare in Chaucer - he preferred 'wed'.

Lots of homographs in English have different origins. For instance, downs meaning 'high land' is from Old English dún (hill), whereas down meaning feathers comes from the Old Norse dúnn. When British children call their mother 'mummy' the origin of this 'mummy' is the babyish syllable 'ma', whereas mummy as in Egyptian mummy ultimately comes from Persian and Arabic words to do with embalming. Punch meaning 'hit' has a French root related to puncture, whereas punch the drink is from Sanskrit, where 'pun' is 5 - punch traditionally contained five ingredients.