Climbing

The thirtieth entry is a escalada de blocos, and the two languages went looking for different things when they had to name the rock. Portuguese took o bloco, which came in through French bloc from a Germanic word for a log or a lump, and that name describes a shape: a solid mass, squared off, with no rope on it. English reached instead for « boulder », and that word is much stranger than it looks. It arrives in Middle English from a Scandinavian source, and its relative in Swedish dialect is bullersten, built on buller, a rumbling noise, and sten, a stone. A boulder was a stone big enough to be heard knocking about in a stream bed: the word names a sound, and the size came afterwards, once nobody could hear the sound inside it any longer. From there « bouldering » was coined on home ground in the last century, and a good many languages have borrowed it out of English unchanged. Portuguese is one of those that declined it and translated instead, which is why this page says A escalada de blocos faz-se sem corda.