Word of the day: calf

A stretch during Pilates made me wonder about the word calf : is the calf to the thigh as a calf is to a cow? Might the name for the body part have something to do with that part being smaller than another part?

The Oxford English Dictionary shows the words for the young bovine and “the fleshy hinder part of the shank of the leg” as having separate origins. The first calf, the older word, comes from Germanic: the dictionary traces a dozen relations. (The modern German for calf  is Kalb.) The second calf, the dictionary says, is “apparently” from the Old Norse kálfi, a word of unknown origin. The dictionary also notes a conjecture that the second calf is adopted from the Gaelic calpa, meaning “calf.”

But wait — which kind of calf is a calpa?

Merriam-Webster has much more to say about the second calf , tracing kálfi, or kalfi, to “a Germanic source probably akin to early Modern Dutch kalf ‘swelling of the hand or foot,’ Old High German wazzerchalp ‘edema,’ German dialect Kalb ‘muscle.’

The American Heritage Dictionary suggests that there might be a connection between the one kind of calf and the other. This dictionary’s etymology for the first calf begins with the Old Norse kālfi (not kálfi or kalfi ) and has the second calf coming into our language from Middle English, and — wait for it — “possibly akin to” the word for the young bovine.

And the Online Etymology Dictionary ties the two calfs together, with the second calf  “possibly from the same Germanic root” as the first. And as for the first calf, this OED (heh) suggests that it may derive from the Proto-Indo-European *gelb(h)-, “from root *gel- ‘to swell,’ hence, ‘womb, fetus, young of an animal.’”

I'd much rather think of the calf as akin to a baby animal, and not as a sign of edema. Moo.

[Our household happily recommends Rachel Lawrence’s YouTube channel for Pilates. Merriam-Webster traces thigh to Middle English, “from Old English thēoh; akin to Old High German dioh ‘thigh,’ Lithuanian taukai, plural, ‘fat.’” In other words, the fat part of the leg. No cow.]