The gym and training

The thirteenth entry is o haltere, and the two languages named the same object from two different rooms. Portuguese kept the Greek word. Haltēres were the weights an ancient Greek long jumper carried, one in each hand, and swung forward at take-off; the noun is built on the verb for leaping, and French kept it as well, while Spanish holds on to it chiefly inside the name of the sport, halterofilia. English named the same object after a machine that made no noise. In the early eighteenth century a « dumb bell » was an exercise frame copied from the gear a bell-ringer hauls on, with the bell itself left off, so that a gentleman could work the ropes indoors without waking the parish; « dumb » there means silent, and nothing else. When the frame shrank to a shaft with a weight at each end, the name travelled with it. The rest of the story sits on the next line of this page: a barra is « the barbell », a compound built on the older word, in which « bell » is the ghost of that silent bell, hanging on in a thing that never rang.