Down

I went for a walk on Pewley Down (Guildford) yesterday. The word 'down' is associated with going towards the ground, or being in a lower position, but a down is an area of high land (it's more commonly seen in the plural eg Epsom Downs, the South Downs). Despite these apparently different senses, both down as a noun (meaning high land), and down as an adverb or preposition have the same origin. They both go back to the Old English word dún, meaning hill. Old English also had the phrase of dún, off the hill, and this soon became one contracted word - adún. By late Old English the a was often dropped. The spelling down became common only in the 17th century.

 

The word is probably even older than Old English; the OED says it's likely it has a Celtic origin and notes that dún is hill or hill fort in Old Irish. It's true that the word dún meaning hill appears in Old Germanic languages and dialects eg dúna in Old Dutch, but the OED thinks that the Saxons may have adopted the word from Britain after settling here.

 

Incidentally, down meaning feathers has another history. It was also once originally dún, but in this case dún was an Old Norse word.

Comments

[John]

What's the connection with a fairly common tradition of naming race courses "_____ Downs"? Usage in this context is far from universal here in the US, but frequent enough to raise the question.

[Virtual Linguist]

Thanks, John. I can only think of Epsom Downs, which is the location of a racecourse in the UK, and there Downs refers to high grassy land. Perhaps other racecourses wanted to link themselves with Epsom?

[John]

Right off the top -Suffolk Downs in Boston, Churchill Downs (KY), both horse tracks, and Dover (DE) & Hampton Downs (VA), auto tracks. My suspicion is that the 'Downs' part is derived from Epsom, but that's just a guess.

[grace]

My dad says that the 'Downs' part is definately from Epsom, apparently he knows everything about everything you know.

[katie]

Epsom is definitely linked to down's. It is amazing what you can find out from the internet.

[sophie]

The Epsom races are epic, who cares what it means or where it derives from.