In life, and etymology, love is love

On this Valentine’s Day, during these times, I think we could all do with something simple and something kind.

In etymology, as in life, love is “love.”

The etymology of the word love

Love comes from the Old English lufu, which meant “love.” And there isn’t too much more we really need to say about that.

OK, maybe a few things. I’ll keep each to about the size of a pip of chocolate.

• The form of love changed over the centuries, but you can see how its original pronunciation—a bit like [ luh-foo ]—remains reflected in how we pronounce its short vowel today.
  
• The Oxford English Dictionary finds evidence for love in some of the earliest records we have of the English language: the Vespasian Psalter, an illuminated Latin-English manuscript of the Psalms, dated to the 700s.
  
• Love is a word of sturdy Germanic stock (cf. German Liebe). Historical linguists propose a Proto-Germanic root of *lubo and the Proto-Indo-European *leubh- before it.
  
• Another descendant of the Proto-Indo-European *leubh- is libido. That word comes from the Latin for “desire, longing, pleasure.” 😏
  
• Interestingly, most North Germanic (Scandinavian) nouns for love are based on such Old Norse forms as kærligr (“loving,” literally, “dear-like,”). For the verb, elska.
  
• English words related to love include belief and believe, whose roots are considered to have a literal sense of “holding dear.” Isn’t that nice?
  
• Belief and believe are connected to lief, an adjective meaning “dear, beloved.” This lief is the source of the live- in livelong (“entire,” literally “dear long”), as in the livelong day.
  
• Lief went on to become an adverb meaning “gladly.” We now mainly encounter it in the construction (would) as lief in older literature, but sometimes still in humorously archaic quips, as in I would as lief eat dirt as read any more about etymology.
  
• Leave, as in by your leave or take one’s leave, is related to love. The -lough in the Dutch-derived furlough is also related. (Leave, as in “depart,” is not.)

I leave you with this, as I have yet more etymological love to give this Valentine’s Day. Find out the heart—and many cognates—of the word “heart” in this post from my archives.