Woodland and timber

The sixteenth entry is a bolota, and the two languages reached it from opposite ends of Europe. « Acorn » looks transparent and is not. It is not an oak plus a corn, and it never was. The Old English word was æcern, and it named the fruit of the unenclosed land, whatever the wood dropped for the swine in autumn; it is generally taken to stand on the same stem as æcer, the open field, which is our « acre ». Once the word had narrowed to the one nut that mattered, speakers rebuilt it out of the two familiar words it half resembled, and the modern spelling is that guess set in print. Portuguese shows the opposite history. A bolota is not Latin at all: it is Arabic balluta, the acorn and the oak that bears it, and it pushed the inherited word aside in Portuguese and in Spanish alike. The Latin glans survives there only in learned company, inside a glândula. One language rebuilt its own word out of a wrong guess; the other borrowed a better one.