Word Stories: cuckoldry

Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

Thanks to the many people who expressed an interest in last month's column on the verb be. Special thanks go to Luc Vandersmissen of Volos who tells me that before was was was was was is. I'll tell you whether he's right or not when I figure out exactly what it means.

Another item in this month's e-mailbag raises the thorny issue of…ahem…marital fidelity. Aleka Melitoi from Limni on Evia asks about the word cuckoldry. Well, it's a word that is very old-fashioned now but a cuckold is 'the husband of an unfaithful wife'. It developed from the Old French word cucuault (cuckold), composed of the two elements cucu (cuckoo) and -ault (a pejorative suffix). The reference is to the female cuckoo's habit of laying her eggs in another nest, leaving those birds to raise and care for her chick. The word cuckoo is, of course, onomatopoeic and the bird's call is distinctive enough to give it similar sounding names in many different languages, including Latin (cuculus), Modern Greek (κούκος), Hungarian (kakukk), Polish (kuku), Welsh (cwcw) and Japanese (kokyu), to name but a few.

The -ry suffix of cuckoldry (the state or position of a cuckold) is related to its French origins. Many nouns were adopted from French into English that ended in -erie, which eventually became -ery or -ry. Examples include archery, bravery and treachery. This suffix became productive in English and was applied to other stems, leading to bakery, machinery, scenery, etc, and has also led to some rather unusual coinages, particularly in the US, such as eatery, drinkery or even bootery (shoe shop).

In the 16th century, a female equivalent of cuckold was coined, cuckquean, now obsolete, although James Joyce used it in his novel Ulysses in 1922. The second element, quean (woman, especially a badly-behaved one) can be traced back to the Gothic qino (woman) and ultimately derives from the same root as the Greek γυναίκα. It looks like it should be the same word as the modern queen but, although it shares the same origins, in Middle English both words existed and were pronounced differently, hence the different spelling.

If there are any aspects of English words you've always wondered about, drop me a line at [email protected] and I'll see if I can come up with an answer.