Where does the word dance come from?
Half the world shares one word for dance, borrowed from French, and its origin is a mystery. The languages that kept their own words cannot agree on whether dancing is leaping, whirling, or a ring of people.
The word dance is younger and stranger than the thing it names. Humans have danced since before history, but the English word only arrived around 1300, borrowed from the Old French danser. From French it marched across the continent, becoming Italian danza, Spanish danza, German Tanz, Dutch dans, and Russian tanets. Where the French themselves got it, nobody is quite sure; the best guess is an old Frankish word for trembling or swaying. Half the world shares one word for dance, and it keeps its own origin a secret. Which is fitting, because the languages that did not borrow it cannot agree on what dancing even is.
To dance is to leap
Before French, Latin had its own word, saltare, “to dance,” which was simply the verb salire, “to leap,” worn into a habit. To a Roman, to dance was to jump, over and over. That leap is still with us, in saltation, in the somersault, a “leap over,” and in the salire cousins assault, insult, and result, each of them a kind of jumping at, upon, or back. The same idea surfaces far from Rome. One of the Hebrew words for dancing means to skip, and the Japanese odori is a dance of leaping and stamping. For much of the world, to dance is to leave the ground.
To dance is to throw yourself about
The Greeks had a different picture. Their ballizein meant to dance by tossing the body around, a cousin of ballein, “to throw.” Latin took it as ballare, Spanish made it bailar, the ordinary word for dance, and from that one root tumbled a whole ballroom of English words: the ball you dance at, the ballet, the ballerina, and even the ballad, which began as a song you danced to. The ball you throw is a different word entirely, an old Germanic one; the two only look alike. To hold a grand ball is, at the root, to hold a throwing-yourself-about.
To dance is to turn
Elsewhere the essential motion is not up but around. Japanese keeps two words: odori, the leaping dance, and mai, the turning one, a slow circling glide. Hebrew has a word for dance built on the idea of whirling in a ring, and the turning dancer runs from the round dances of the village green to the spinning of the Sufi dervishes. Where one language sees a jump, another sees a spin.
To dance is a ring of people
And sometimes the word is not a movement at all, but a crowd. The Greek khoros meant a band of dancers moving and singing together, and it has left English a surprising family: the chorus, the choir, the chorale, and choreography, which is literally “dance-writing.” The Muse who watched over it was Terpsichore, “she who delights in the dance.” When a modern chorus stands still and merely sings, it has forgotten that its name once meant a ring of people dancing.
So the world cannot agree on what dancing is. To leap, to throw yourself about, to turn, to gather in a ring: every language has quietly cast its vote and preserved it in the word. And the one word that conquered half the globe, dance, refuses to say where it came from, which is perhaps the most honest answer of all, since nobody can quite say where dancing came from either. It is the same disagreement hidden in the world’s words for the calls of animals: each language certain it is only describing, and quietly describing itself. Once you hear it, you cannot stop.
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