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Today's Word "Gauntlet"

The glove of a suit of armor on

Published in Vocabulary

gauntlet /GANT-let/ (noun) - 1 : The glove of a suit of armor. 2 : Two lines of tormentors with flailing sticks between which someone must run as punishment or initiation.

"To get to Maude's wonderful dinner we had to run the gauntlet of Harrison's horrid before-dinner puns."

 

The first of today's words comes from French gantelet "glove," a diminutive of gant "glove" from Old French guant" (compare Spanish and Portuguese guante "glove" and Italian guanto "glove"). The word was apparently borrowed from a Germanic language as want- but, since the Romance languages did not have a [w] sound, that sound was replaced by [gw] (spelled "gu"). The same thing happened when Germanic "ward" was borrowed as "guard." The second word that merged with today's was borrowed as "gantlope" from Swedish gatlopp comprising gata "lane" (akin to English "go") + lopp "running, course" (akin to English "lope")


 

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