That thing we drink and swim in and clean with and splash at our friends. I have hundreds of pictures of water from my travels already, from fountains to rivers to waterfalls.

Water comes from wodor, the suffixed form of the Proto-Indo-European word for “water, wet”.

This then evolved into watr in Proto-Germanic and wæter in Old English.

This ancestry is still visible/audible in modern-day Swedish (vatten), Dutch (water), and German (Wasser).

The Germanic heritage is the reason for which water sounds nothing like the equivalent words for our Romance language speaking friends (acqua, agua, eau), which come from the Latin aqua.

Funny tidbit: alcohol is sometimes referred to as eau de vie which translates from French to water of life.

The French obviously have their priorities right.

Happy Humpday! See you next week with more nerdy word history. As always, feel free to request words you’d like to learn about in the comments below or on Instagram.

References

Online Etymology Dictionary: Water
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=water

Online Etymology Dictionary: Eau
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=eau