Hello,

This week’s word comes with thanks to Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary of the English language. He includes several intriguing word histories along with his definitions and I couldn’t resist following up on what he says about the word bribe.

He defines it as “a reward given to pervert the judgement, or corrupt the conduct.” That definition hasn’t changed since 1755. He also gives the etymology and says it comes from French “originally signifies a piece of bread, and is applied to any piece taken from the rest; it is therefore likely, that a bribe originally signified, among us, a share of any thing unjustly got.”

Bribe is now used as both a verb and a noun and both arrived into English in the 1300s. Unfortunately I don’t have any photos of my own bread-making moments so you’ll have to make do with this delicious bread from Milan, which I promise was not given to me as a bribe.

Some more research tells me that yes, bribe came to English from Old French where bribe was a gift, or a hunk of bread given to beggars. Old French also had the word bribeor (beggar) thanks to the verb briber (to beg). Spanish and Italian have cousin words briba (vagrancy) and birbone (vagrant). There is some debate about the origin of the word before that point with suggestions being made about breva in Breton and briwo (to break) in Welsh which imply a Celtic source but that’s far from certain.

While the importance of bread in daily life makes the begging and sharing of bread logical to me, I’m less sure about bribing somebody with a loaf. Having said that, freshly baked bread is a very tempting thing. Perhaps I could be bribed with bread.

Also this week – I had a really fun chat with Art on the Cozy Christmas podcast recently about my book “Words Christmas Gave Us” (find all the ways to get my books here) and it’s available now for listeners.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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