Between the etymological cushions of “couch”

Couch. IYKYK. I’ll leave my news peg for this post at that.

English has been sitting on couch since at least the 1300s, and the word originally referred to a different piece of furniture: “bed.” Among other senses, couch evolved over the next century or so to specify, like today, a piece of furniture that people sit or recline on—and, of course, still sleep on. 

As for couch vs. sofa vs. davenport vs. settee? Each of those have their own coins lost in them that I may dig out at a different time. 

For the origin of couch, French is, as ever, the great mover of word furniture from Latin into English. And its form has been quite rearranged in the lexical living room. 

The origin of couch

Couch is borrowed from the French couche, “bed, lair,” from an older form, culche. And this L section, this … section L? These French nouns are derived from verbs—coucher, culcher—that come from the Latin verb collocāre, “to place, arrange.” 

OTTER ASIDE! This “lair” sense of couch is seen in the use of the word to name the dens of animals. Apparently, otter dens have at least historically been called couches. No wonder these lil spankers seem so loose and relaxed.

The Latin collocāre features the prefix com-, “with, together,” and locāre. So, a couch, in a manner of thinking, is something “placed together.” (Affixes are like language’s ottoman, onto which we throw up the feet of so many other words.)

The verb locāre, in turn, is based on the noun, locus, “place, site,” among many other meanings.  Local, locate, location: all of these words, and many more, are ultimately from locus. 

Collocations: words couched together

Collocāre also yields the word collocation, which, in linguistics, is when a set of words habitually occur or are used together. For example, we say commit a crime in English, not do a crime. Or take scenic, which is widely collocated in the phrases scenic view or scenic route. 

Now, the word couch in English is also a verb, coming into English from French roughly around the same time and from those verbs, coucher and culcher, noted above. Originally meaning “to lay (someone or something) down” or “to put to bed,” the verb couch has welcomed many semantic butts over its years, including “to express something in a particular language or style.” 

And this sense of couch? It’s typically collocated—as we might take some liberty to say for the sake of connection and cleverness—in the expression “to couch/be couched in (words, language),” e.g., The priest delivered a homily couched in the language of popular culture. 

Couched in the change of time

The deeper roots of Latin’s locus are, as with so many etymologies, obscure, but word historians have evidence for an older former: stlocus.

Stlocus. 

From stlocus to couch. Words are like pull-out couches, changing form and function as they are moved around in our mouths, their cushions sometimes thrown off, as if to make blanket forts elsewhere in the play of language.

For more words in the news, check out the origin of the word czar in this post from my archives.