Why is autumn also called fall?
Fall sounds like an Americanism, but England coined it. The season has carried three names, and the one that sounds newest is really the oldest of them all.
Autumn and fall are both English words, and the real surprise is which one is older. Fall sounds like a modern Americanism, the plain cousin to Britain’s elegant autumn. In fact it was born in England, and it is the native word; autumn is the import. Britain simply dropped fall, and America kept it. Before either of them, the season went by a third name entirely.
The season called harvest
For most of English history, the months of reaping were not called autumn or fall. They were called harvest. In Old English, hærfest was the name of the season itself, and it held that job for centuries. You can still see it in German, where autumn is Herbst to this day.
The word goes back to an ancient root meaning “to pluck or gather,” the same root that gives Latin its carpere, “to pluck,” the verb hiding inside carpe diem, “pluck the day.” As the centuries passed and fewer people lived by the farming calendar, harvest quietly narrowed. It stopped meaning the season and came to mean only the act of bringing the crops in, leaving a gap where the season’s name used to be.
Autumn, the import
Into that gap came autumn, borrowed in the fourteenth century from the Latin autumnus by way of French. It is the fancier word because it is the foreign one, arriving with all the prestige that Latin carried. Fittingly for a season of mists, its own origin is a genuine mystery: scholars cannot say for certain where the Romans got autumnus, and the best guess points, vaguely, at the Etruscans. We have named the season after a word whose own roots we have lost.
Fall, the leaf
Fall arrived around the same time, and it is as English as a word can be. It is simply short for the old phrase fall of the leaf, the time when the leaves come down, and it was coined as the neat partner to spring, which is short for spring of the leaf, the time they come up. For a brief, tidy moment English named its two turning seasons by what the leaf was doing: springing in one, falling in the other. It is one of the most elegant pairs the language ever made, and half of it is now thought of as American.
The word that crossed the Atlantic
Here is how that happened. When English settlers sailed for America in the seventeenth century, they took fall with them, because at the time everyone in England used it. Back home, over the next couple of centuries, autumn slowly won out, and fall faded until it sounded old-fashioned, then foreign. In America it never left. So the word that now sounds unmistakably American is really a piece of older English that Britain let go of. It is the same quiet reversal hiding in soccer: the one that sounds like the newcomer is the one that was there first.
So the season has worn three names, each from a different age: harvest, the old English one that slipped away to the barn; autumn, the Latin guest whose own past is lost; and fall, the homemade word that had to cross an ocean to survive. The next time someone insists it is properly called autumn, you can tell them that fall is the more English of the two, and that the leaves have been falling by that name for longer than anyone remembers.
The Monthly Lemma follows one everyday word a month all the way back to its root, then posts the whole story to your door. One word, and the world behind it.
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