Did you know that a shambles was originally a meat slaughterhouse and market? I didn’t. It came to be used for scenes of carnage and disorder, and later lost the sense of guts and gore to become a description of a teenager’s bedroom. Except in England, where it survives as a place name — The Shambles in York, for example.

The word ‘cheap’ is another one associated with markets. It comes through old English from a Latin word meaning a small trader or innkeeper. In old English, it came to mean a market, giving us market towns such as Chipping Campden and Chepstow. In the fifteenth century, a good cheap was a good bargain,  which lead to the modern meaning.

As to my own name, the original Old English was cniht, meaning a boy or a youth. It was a term common to the Germanic languages and came to mean young warrior and then military follower before it settled into its current meaning (a rank in the nobility) in around the mid-sixteenth century. My full surname is Knighton, and a ton was a homestead, piece of land, or group of buildings enclosed in some way. Originally, in the Germanic languages, it meant a fortified place, but some of the other languages derived from Proto-Germanic have settled on a meaning of ‘hedge or fence’. So I’ve always suggested that my surname means the young fellow hiding behind the hedge.

The word evolved by the mid twelfth century to mean an inhabited place larger than a village; our modern spelling is ‘town’.

The measure ‘ton’ comes from a French word meaning ‘cask’. It was a measure of weight — the quantity necessary to fill a cask, hence a ‘ton of bricks’.

The Georgian ‘ton’ is a different word altogether. It comes from Old French — ‘ton’ was a musical sound or tone. From the fifteenth century, the word ‘tone’ was used in English to mean a manner of speaking, but in the eighteenth century the French word was borrowed again, this time to mean ‘the prevailing mode or style’. The full phrase was ‘le bon ton’ — those of good manners. Members of the ton came from the aristocracy, the gentry, and royalty.

Isn’t language fun?