Western Words: Origins and Histories

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullma

A great source for both readers and writers of Westerns is available online—free of charge. The Online Etymology Dictionary lets writers check the dates from which words were first and lets both authors and fans check out the often-interesting histories associated with the words.

For example, the first appearance of the word “six-shooter,” referring to “a revolver with six chambers,” is “attested” in 1844. Obviously, novels set before that year shouldn't refer to a six-shot revolver as a “six-shooter,” while stories involving later periods are free to do so.

Courtesy of the June 18, 1864, Scientific American, the dictionary's same page offers this intriguing nugget concerning the Gatling gun:

For the first time in this war [the American Civil War], the Gatling gun was used by Butler in repelling one of Beauregard's midnight attacks. Dispatches state that it was very destructive, and rebel prisoners were very curious to know whether it was loaded all night and fired all day.

“Brand,” as a verb, referring to the impression or burning “of a mark with a hot iron,” originally referred to the performance of this act as a means of marking criminals, to both stigmatize and identify them as such. The word thus acquired the “figurative sense” of fixing “a character of infamy upon.” by the 1850s, the verb became associated with marking items to indicate one's ownership of them. The use of “brand” as a noun didn't occur until 1828, when it referred both to the instrument of branding and to the resulting mark.

“Spitoon” was first used in 1811. Before there were “spitoons,” there were “spitting boxes.”

In the Middle Ages, a pommel would be found on the handle of a sword, not on a saddle; the term originally referred to “ornamental knob . . . . at the end of a sword hilt.” It first began to be used as the name of the 'front peak of a saddle” in the mid-fifteenth century.

There are lots of other words that may be of interest to Western readers and writers. Online Etymology Dictionary may not include every one of them, but it lists plenty. Make a list and dig in or return again and again to this etymological gold mine (“late 15c., "place where gold is dug out of the earth," from gold (n.) + mine (n.). Figurative use "anything productive of great wealth" is by 1882.”)