Word Stories: own

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

I’ve been reading Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 satire on the mid-nineteenth century marriage market, and I came across this sentence:

She did not dare to own that the man she loved was her inferior.

Anyone who has read any English novels of the nineteenth century will probably be familiar with this use of own to mean ‘admit’, but how did the word take on its modern meaning of ‘possess’?

Well, in truth, it isn’t a modern meaning at all. In Old English and early Middle English, up to around 1300, the word (in various forms) meant ‘possess’. And then, strangely, the verb all but disappears until the 17th century, when it reappears with both meanings, ‘possess’ and ‘admit’. The revival of the verb seems to have been made possible by the survival of derivative forms such as owner. In order to understand what happened during its dormant period, and why it was revived, we need to look at another related verb: owe.

In Old English, owe meant the same as own (possess). This was used continuously through Middle English and into Modern English, finally becoming obsolete towards the end of the 17th century. From around the middle of the tenth century, owe also had its modern meaning of ‘have to pay or repay’. As owe settled exclusively into this second meaning and lost the first, so own got a new lease of life to fill the gap. The further meaning own acquired, that of ‘admit’, seems to have developed from the sense of ‘acknowledge as belonging to one’.

Owe has another distinction. Its original past tense has given us the semi-modal verb ought. Ought meant ‘possessed’, ‘owed’ and also ‘owed as a duty’, and it’s this last sense which led to its use to express obligation. Much to the annoyance of learners of English, ought, of course, is followed by the infinitive with to, unlike other modal verbs. You can reassure your students, though, that their mistakes with it are not without some justification: until the middle of the nineteenth century, ought was followed by either the full or the bare infinitive.