“[In the] UK – we call it Autumn, from the French word ‘autompne’, and later, the Latin ‘autumnus’,” begins a now-infamous tweet from 2013. “[In the] US – WE CALL IT FALL BECAUSE LEAF FALL DOWN”.
It’s undoubtedly funny, but is it true? Well, not quite.
Why do Brits call fall “autumn”?
First things first: the French word for that season is not autompne, but automne. The original tweeter presumably meant to write “Old French”, in which autompne, or perhaps autumpne, is indeed one potential source of the English word autumn.
That said, it’s at most half the story. The Oxford English Dictionary puts the etymology of the word as “Partly a borrowing from French. Partly a borrowing from Latin,” while Merriam-Webster places the more direct root as the Latin autumnus.
Some etymologists go further, linking autumnus to the Etruscan autu or auta, in turn coming from avil, meaning “year”. The idea, theoretically – for obvious reasons, we can’t really ask any Etruscans for confirmation – is that the word comes from the passing of the year. Overall, though, “etymologists aren’t sure where the Latin word came from,” admits Merriam-Webster.
However the word came into the English language, it seems to have been a hit. Chaucer used it in around 1382 to describe the god Boreas, who, he says, “makeþ þat plenteuouse autumpne in fulle ȝeres fletiþ wiþ heuy grapes”; a few years later, John de Trevisa, in his translation of Bartholomew de Glanville’s De proprìetatibus rerum, would write that, “Haruest hatte autumpnus and haþ þat name of augendo, echinge, for þat tyme namelich corn and fruyt beþ echid”.
In that last quote, we can see a good reason why people began using the word: “the common name for this intermediary season prior to the arrival of autumn was harvest, which was potentially confusing,” explains Merriam-Webster, “since harvest can refer to both the time when harvesting crops usually happens (autumn) as well as the actual harvesting of crops (harvest).”
Using “autumn”, or whatever spelling those olden days guys felt was right, was therefore useful, as well as sounding – thanks to the French and Latin influence – a little bit posh. No wonder it caught on.
Why do Americans call autumn “fall”?
So, if we already had a perfectly good word before even Shakespeare came along, then why is the usual word on the other side of the pond “fall”? Well, it all comes down to… poetry, actually.
“In Septembre in fallynge of the lefe
Whan phebus made his declynacyon
And all the whete gadred was in the shefe
By radyaunt hete and operacyon
Whan the vyrgyn had full domynacyon
And Dyane entred was one degre
Into the sygne of Gemyne”
So begins chapter one of Stephen Hawes’s poem The Example of Vertu, dating from around the turn of the 16th century – and right there, in the first line, you can see the rather dashing turn of phrase, the “falling of the leaf”, to describe the season of autumn.
It was from this that the term “fall” – or, more fully, “fall of the leaf” – started to take hold in English, with writers such as Roger Ascham describing the year as being split into ‘‘Spring tyme, somer, faule of the leafe, and winter” as early as 1545.
Pretty quickly, this became shortened in everyday speech to just “the fall”: “ma[n] is ordeined to the order, chang, and alteracyon of tyme, as thorder of the yere appointeth,” wrote John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, in 1550, “now to be subiect vnto summer, nowe vnto winter, now to the sprynge, and nowe to the falle: so hath God ordained[.]”
Evidently, then, “fall” is just as good English as “autumn”, and with almost as well-established a pedigree. By the time the British started sending people over to the New World in the 17th century, both terms were pretty standard – but eventually, “fall” just happened to prove more popular on the western side of the Atlantic.
“As time went on, the English spoken in America and the English spoken in Britain diverged: there wasn’t as much contact between the two groups of English speakers,” explains Merriam-Webster (and they should know, being partially named after a guy most famous for inventing American English out of spite.)
“Throw into the mix the independence of the United States, and the fact that the type of English spoken in America became part of our early national identity, and the gulf between the two dialects of English widened.”
By the 19th century, “fall” was considered on both sides of the pond to be unequivocally American, while “autumn” was the term favored – or favoured – back in the UK. So here’s the question…
Who’s right?
Clearly, there’s not much in it: “autumn” dates from slightly earlier, but neither term can be said to be some terrible neologism like “phubbing” or “Deltacron”.
Numbers-wise, “autumn” probably comes out on top. It’s the preferred term in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand; Canada apparently uses either term interchangeably, leaving the US alone in preferring “fall” so overwhelmingly.
Even outside of English, romance languages tend to name the season something akin to “autumn” – compare Spanish “otoño”, Italian “autunno”, or Romanian “toamnă” – while Germanic or Scandinavian languages go further back, using some cognate of “harvest” – think of German “Herbst”, Swedish “höst”, or Scots “hairst”.
Nobody, in other words, seems to go for this “fall of the leaf” etymology outside of North America. But does that mean “autumn” is somehow “more correct”?
Of course not. And if you want proof, look no further than Henry Watson Fowler – the legendary author of both A Dictionary of Modern English Usage and, with his brother, The Concise Oxford Dictionary, and renowned as a “lexicographical genius”. According to him, “Fall is better on the merits than autumn, in every way: it is short, Saxon (like the other three season names), picturesque; it reveals its derivation to every one who uses it, not to the scholar only, like autumn.”
“We once had as good a right to it as the Americans,” he lamented, “but we have chosen to let the right lapse, and to use the word now is no better than larceny.”
So, “autumn” or “fall”? It’s really just a matter of preference. We’ll give this to the meme, though: it may be called Fall because “leaf fall down”, but that’s not a reflection on the US or Americans as a people. After all, the English unequivocally called it that first – and in certain circumstances, still do.
After all, “spring forward, autumn back” isn’t nearly as good a mnemonic as the normal version, is it?
