roke

[prettygoodword]

Since it looks likely I'll make it online for all but one workday this week, another theme: 4x4, in which every word has four letters.


roke (ROHK) - n., a vein of ore, a seam in an ingot of ore; mist, smoke, damp.


Also, as a verb, to smoke or steam. This is from an English dialect word, first recorded in general use in the last 19th century.

---L.

Comments

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

I started to wonder how English would've borrowed the smoke/mist sense, especially during C19, and OED3 points out what I'd thought I remembered, that it's also attested plentifully in premodern English. English has it from a Scandinavian language, though cf. modern German der Rauch and verb rauchen (latter used for conventional cigarette smoking, which I find fitting because the C13-15 English sense--dunno about later--is definite about its being a negative, noxious kind of smoke).

So now I am curious about this ore sense! Intriguing, and almost certainly unrelated to the smoke....

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

That is interesting -- and none of that comes through in the online dictionaries, which give the impression that the ore-vein sense came first and the smoke from that. I agree, though, it sounds like they're separate words that converged.

Hmm.

---L.