As Father’s Day comes around again, we often think about the men in our lives, even those who might not be fathers. But rarely do we consider how the different words we use today to refer to men developed — ranging from being a man, a guy, or a dad.

The dawn of mankind

Perhaps the most typical label we use for those who identify as the masculine gender is the word man, a word as old as English, though in Old English it only meant “mankind.”

The Old English mann was related to German mann, Dutch and Swedish man and Danish mand, which tells us that these languages inherited the word from an older Germanic source language. However, its origin story grows somewhat murky as we move further beyond its Germanic past.

We find another relative in the Sanskrit word manu (also meaning “mankind” or a progenitor of man), suggesting that all these words derived from the ancient Indo-European language that spawned both Sanskrit and the Germanic languages, though no evidence exists of such a word itself.

Living in a man’s world

Unlike its use in modern English, the Old English word (mann) was not a way to talk about an individual man. Instead, using it to refer to a single member of mankind only developed later, during the Middle English period.

Were-wolf howling at the moon

Source: Jr Korpa/Unsplash

Still, there was a way to talk about an individual male person in Old English by instead using the word were (also sometimes translated as “husband”). Were seems to have come from the Latin word vir, also meaning “man.” This is why when we imagine werewolves, we usually think specifically of a man that turns into a wolf, since this is exactly what the compound werewolf means.

More unexpected is that the word world is also related to Old English were, i.e., were + olde, which translates as “the age of man,” a phrase which eventually became more about the place man occupies, rather the time he lived.

What a guy!

One thing that has definitely changed during the age of man is how we talk about him. While the word man still wins out in more formal contexts, in more casual or colloquial speech the word guy became a very common way to refer to a male person starting in the 1800s, most particularly in American speech.

Historically, the word derives from a specific person who was named Guy — i.e., Guy Fawkes, one of the Catholic conspirators involved in the Gunpowder Plot, a stymied rebellion that occurred in Britain in 1605. The plotters intended to blow up the House of Lords to get rid of King James’ Protestant regime and Guy Fawkes, as their munitions expert, was caught holding the flame to light the gunpowder hidden under the Parliament building in just the nick of time.

As a result, the day in question, November 5, was subsequently approved as a holiday by Parliament, mainly in celebration of the fact that they were not blown to bits. Guy Fawkes, in turn, was convicted of treason and hung, but his name lived on in infamy because part of the annual November fifth festivities involved burning effigies of the men considered responsible for the plot and these were referred to as “Guys.”

After first being used exclusively as a name for these effigies, the word guy started to expand to be used to refer to actual people, but at first only for those qualifying as very bad guys. Eventually, the word began to lose its negative stigma, especially in American English, and started to be used more widely as simply another way to refer to a man.

From guy to guido

There is also a less common colloquial term for man, and one which has a more specific social association, that of a “guido.” Guido, it turns out, is the Italian equivalent of the name Guy, and Guy Fawkes apparently went by the name Guido Fawkes. While, over time, the word guy lost its negative association, guido still maintains a derogatory sense, often used to refer to an overly showy man with a bit too much machismo.

The father of men

Finally, since it is Father’s Day, we turn to the origin of our words for men who become fathers. The word father also appears to be a very old one, with similar words in most languages that developed from an older Indo-European source language.

However, while most Germanic languages have words for fathers that start with an “f” sound, many other languages use “p” sounds in that position, particularly older languages like Latin (pater), Ancient Greek (patér) and Sanskrit (pitar).

Since the shared original Indo-European language is not thought to have an f or th sound, but likely did have p, b, and d like sounds, papa, dada or baba, words similar to those used by young children to refer to their dads, are probably closer to ancient version of father-words than those that later developed in English and German (such as father or vater).

The far reach of fathers

Even more intriguing is the fact that words for father in unrelated languages around the globe seem to have similar sounding words for father — a situation that is not true of words like guy or man which can only be traced back to a specific language family. This suggests that babies and their universal form of babble might have early on spawned the word for dads the world, or werold, over.