In etymology, two or more words in the same language are called doublets or etymological twins (or possibly triplets, etc.) when they have the same etymological root but have entered the language through different routes. Because the relationship between words that have the same root and the same meaning is fairly obvious, the term is mostly used to characterize pairs of words that have diverged in meaning, at times making their shared root a point of irony.
For example English pyre and fire are doublets. Subtle differences in the resulting modern words contribute to the richness of the English language, as indicated by the doublets frail and fragile (which share the Latin root, fragilis): one might refer to a fragile tea cup and a frail old woman, but a frail tea cup and fragile old woman are subtly different and possibly confusing descriptions.
Another example of nearly synonymous doublets is aperture and overture (the commonality behind the meanings is "opening"), but doublets may develop divergent meanings, such as the opposite words, host and guest from the same PIE root, which occur as a doublet in Old French hospes, before having been borrowed into English. Doublets also vary with respect to how far their forms have diverged. For example, the resemblance between levy and levee is obvious, whereas the connection between sovereign and soprano is harder to guess synchronically from the forms of the words alone.
Etymological twins are usually a result of chronologically separate borrowing from a source language. In the case of English, this usually means once from French during the Norman invasion, and again later, after the word had evolved. An example of this is warranty and guarantee. Another possibility is borrowing from both a language and its daughter language (usually Latin and some other Romance language). Words which can be traced back to Indo-European languages, such as the Romance "beef" and the Germanic "cow", in many cases actually do share the same proto-Indo-European root. The forward linguistic path also reflects cultural and historical transactions; often the name of an animal comes from Germanic while the name of its cooked meat comes from Romance. Since English is unusual in that it borrowed heavily from two distinct branches of the same linguistic family tree, it has a relatively high number of this latter type of etymological twin.
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Examples in English include:
Notice the multiple doublets caused by the w → g sound change in French.
| Norman | Modern |
|---|---|
| candle | chandelier |
| car | chariot |
| castle | chateau |
| catch | chase |
| cattle | chattels |
| convey | convoy |
| patch | piece |
| pouch | |
| glamour | grammar |
| reward | regard |
| wallop | gallop |
| ward | guard |
| warden | guardian |
| wardrobe | garderobe |
| warranty | guarantee |
| wile | guile |
| wise | guise |
|
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