This is Part 2 of 3 parts of Oak Word Lore. Part 3 will follow.
Druid Druid derives from a Celtic oak word. Druids were teacher-priests of an ancient Celtic religion that worshipped oak trees in Gaul, Britain and Ireland. Their name was first borrowed into Latin and Greek from an Old Celtic or Gaulish form like *druides. Compare modern Irish and Gaelic forms like draoi (draoidh, druidh, gen. druadh) meaning ‘magician’ and Welsh dryw ‘sorcerer.’ The Gaelic druidh seems to be a compound of *dru + *uid = oak-knower. In the ancient Celtic society Druid was a name bestowed on a seer or visionary who possessed ‘oak knowledge.’ Even the ancient Romans learned some Druid lore. The Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder knew about Druids’ holding sacred both mistletoe and oak groves: "The Druids...hold nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the tree on which it grows provided it is an oak. They choose the oak to form groves, and they do not perform any religious rites without its foliage..." Naturalis Historia (XVI, 95) Pliny also tells of Druid priests using a golden scythe or sickle to gather the mistletoe in the light of the moon. Oak Proverbs
MISTLETOE
It's so Christmassy! But in its original Old English form mistletan, mistletoe means 'shit-on-a-stick.' Oops! It's the poops. The ancient druids held mistletoe sacred, hence an old common name for the plant is druid's herb. The druids thought the plant grew miraculously from bird droppings. In fact mistletoe is a parasite sucking nourishment from the tree hosts that it infests. All in all, a curious plant to symbolize the birth of a god. In Old High German Mist means 'dung.' English belongs to the West Germanic branch of Indo-European languages. Mistel in Old English was the name of the white berries of mistletoe. Mistel meant literally 'shitling' or 'little dropping' and tan was one of the Old English words for 'twig' or 'stick.' The Angles and the Saxons who spoke Old English may have borrowed the word from the Vikings whose language is now called Old Scandinavian and who had a word for mistletoe, mistelteinn 'shit-twig.' Long after the druids, botanists discovered that mistletoe can be propagated from feces dropped on upper tree branches by birds, after they have eaten the sticky, seed-rich, white berries. But don't think of this at all next Christmas when you're standing under the mistletoe waiting to kiss your beloved.
Weather Rhymes about Oak Trees 1. If the oak’s before the ash, Then you’ll only get a splash. If the ash precedes the oak, then you may expect a soak. This rhyme concerning how much rain will fall during an English summer refers to the leafing time of the two trees.
2. Beware of an oak, it draws the stroke; Avoid an ash, it counts the flash; Creep under the thorn, it can save you from harm.
Don’t seek shelter under oak or ash trees during a thunderstorm, as they are often hit by lightning.
The English Word Oak English: oak < oke Middle English < ac Old English < *aig- IE root, a kind of oak, a different species than the *dru- oak.
All the five forms below are cognate with oak. So is the Latin word for a mountain oak, aesculus, and a Greek word for a certain species of oak, aigilops. German: Eiche Dutch: eik Swedish: ek Danish: eg Norwegian: eik
Notes on the Word Acorn The Germanic and Scandinavian languages use a diminutive or a related form of their oak root to make the word for acorn. English follows suite here with Old English aecern. Compare Old Norse akarn whose prime and German Eichel literally ‘little oak thing’ Dutch eikel Swedish ekollon, a compound of ek oak + ollon ‘mast, acorns.’ But this could be folk etymology disguising what was first a diminutive form. Danish agern
Oak Words in Semitic Languages Hebrew: alon (also used as a Hebrew surname much like Oaks in English, e.g. Yigael Alon) This semantic generalization of oak word to tree word occurs in language families outside IE. Consider the modern Hebrew word for tree, ilan, compared to the modern Hebrew word for oak, alon. The root consonant sounds \l\ and \n\ are the same, showing only a slight vowel gradation, common in Semitic and many other languages, used to produce extensions of meaning and various grammatical forms of the root. To give another example, vowel gradation to alter the tense happens in certain irregular English verbs: sing, sang, sung, or swim, swam, swum.
Arabic: ballut. Its stem meaning is ‘acorn.’ The Moors brought the word to Spain where it became the Spanish word for acorn, bellota.
Oak Tree Myths The oak was sacred to early man because its broad crown was often struck by lightning and because its acorns provided sustenance. Primitive humans thought the gods hurled lightning bolts down to earth to display their displeasure at the errant ways of Homo sapiens. Let’s face it: we’ve been guilt-collectors since first we hopped down from a jungle tree, squished a toad, and thus brought upon ourselves ― what? ― the curse of a delayed rainy season because some rain god liked toads due to the fact that he looked like one. Thunder and lightning are symbols of most chief gods in world history, and the oak tree is the divine favourite of Zeus, Jupiter, Jehovah, Thor and the old Finnish god Ukko, whose very name means ‘thunder.’ All these bullying deities represent in one of their several avatars the punitive, cranky old male of the tribe, a mean, vindictive elder, disgruntled that he is old, angry at his declining physical powers, enraged that he can’t have sex as often as younger males or is indeed impotent, hence the frequent scriptural denunciations of sexual pleasure and the wild ranting about holy revenge upon those who will not obey him. All this senile, graceless unwillingness to step aside for the next generation is especially prominent in dour religious texts like the Old Testament. Worship at the Oak of Your Choice Everywhere in their ranges, sacred oaks were sites of prayer and prophesy. At Dodona, one of the oldest magic places in ancient Greece, Zeus whispered prophetic bits of advice in the form of wind rustling through oak leaves in the sacred grove. “Yoo-hoo, Zeus! Listen, big fellah, I didn’t get that last rustle. Could you zephyr that again, Your Windiness?” Historical oracle that it was, Dodona offered variety to the jaded seeker of divine signs. If one grew weary of oak-leaf divination, one of the perky oak-priestesses would waltz over and offer to receive the words of Zeus by listening to the cooing of sacred doves or by interpreting the vibrations from large brass gongs hung on the branches of the sacred oak trees and bonged by mallet or resonant in the wind, whenever a long-distance insight from Olympus was demanded. These shrine-tenders knew they had a good thing, and introduced peppy new oracular modes every so often to keep incoming customers thronging briskly at the Dodonan gates. First Temple : An Oak Grove The word temple derives from templum Latin ‘a space cut off to be holy’ ultimately, like the final part of a Greek word like anatomy, from IE root *tem, *ten ‘to cut or mark off.’ Likewise the Teutonic words for temple all refer to what was first an enclosure around a grove of sacred trees. The word for sanctuary among the druids was nemus, akin to the Latin word, nemus ‘woodland glade, grove of trees.’ Holy stands of tall oaks were the first temples, and the overarching canopy of living leaves may have given later builders of cathedrals the idea for lofty vaults that spanned and enclosed a swatch of heaven. Knock on Wood, But Do It Lightly ‘To knock on wood’ for good luck was first to place a hand on an oak tree. This tree-worship was a serious religion. One can often gauge the sincerity of a religion by the nastiness of retribution meted out to those who transgress its commandments. Here is Sir James Frazer, in his monumental study of magic and religion, The Golden Bough: “How serious that [tree] worship was in former times may be gathered from the ferocious penalty appointed by the old German laws for such as dared to peel the bark of a standing tree. The culprit’s navel was to be cut out and nailed to the part of the tree which he has peeled, and he was to be driven round and round the tree till all his guts were wound about its trunk. The intention of the punishment clearly was to replace the dead bark by a living substitute taken from the culprit.” For an insight into how humans have projected themselves and their needs onto nature, including trees, and for a vivid dissection of the later Nazi ‘forest cult,’ I recommend highly Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama (1995).
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
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sensuous meaning is oak-fruit, hence acorns, hence mast from different nut trees. Here are some other acorn words: 
