Christmas Carol: An Etymology at Bill Casselman's Words of the World & Canadian Word of the Day

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etymology of Christmas carol

Shocking Personal Revelation by Author!

Before filleting with deft scalpel the word carol, I must unfold, from the foxed parchment of my past, a childhood Christmas memory. “Oh please don’t!” I hear you beg. But your qualms are of no avail, dear reader. Onward!

Each November in my Ontario public school, as Yule loomed, glutinous with psychological treacle and all sticky with false bonhommie, our junior school music teacher, whom I shall identify as Miss Treble Cleft Palate, would hold the dreaded Christmas choir try-outs on the creaky stage in the girls’ gym. I, wee Billy, might begin in choir row A as “possible boy soprano phenomenon.” Very soon however, after I had flatted out on the first lines of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” Miss Cleft Palate would move me back to choir row D, to stand glumly beside the “no longer possibles.” My no-voice boy companions would be choral rejects, unsavoury local lads, spawn of moms and dads who were only seen in town when out on a day pass. But, of course, as we learned in Sunday School, “ALL God’s chillun’ got wings.”

Row D included Grade Five boys like Mickey Wrongworm, a lad born with no discernible tongue, and Boris Pediculosivitch Impetigov, a New Canadian lad of Russian descent who was often absent from school because a medical research hospital located 300 miles away paid his mother handsome fees when she permitted doctors to perform incisional biopsies of her son’s manifold skin diseases.

Other than the Christmas Carol Sing for the whole school, Miss Treble Cleft had many duties as junior school music teacher, so she could not take more than an hour to audition and cast the choir. Miss T.C. was a Maritimer and her proudest moment was her annual Nova Scotia-based ballet for the Grade Fours, “Afternoon of a Prawn.”

Suffice to say, at the end of the choir audition, I was in the back row, my flat voice, like my small boy body, hidden by a row of hefty milkmaids, all of whom were from the Scottish side of town and could sing and had names like Fiona McSphincter, a scallop-shaped rotundity with all the allure of a shucked mollusc. All of which memory is placed before you to record that there are persons immune to the overdose of coziness within Christmas carols, stern hearts who do not wax all weepy upon hearing the opening notes of “Adeste, Fideles.” I, for example, find the infantivore Xmas card reproduced below to be — quite original. Is that wee Fiona below, with a sprig of holly atop her tiny noggin? Oh, I hope so.

The Origin of Carol

Carol has enjoyed dozens of spellings, and this orthographic bounty occurred in French as well as English. Consider: karol, karolle, carole, carol, carrol, caroul, karalle, carowl, caryl, carrell, karrel and karil. The French word may have come over to England during the Norman Conquest. It becomes frequent in English manuscripts at the onset of the 14th century.

The French carol was first a ring dance, then a dance accompanied by song, then the song itself. A carol was an ancient pagan round dance with singing by couples, a fertility ring dance first done on May-day celebrations throughout western Europe and then the dancing and singing were shared by once pagan then Christian festivities celebrated at the midwinter solstice.

In the French dialect spoken in the Marne department, carole was a dance or a celebration. In the Swiss Romance dialect, coraula is a round dance. In Provençal and Italian carola is still a dance song or a round dance. The ultimate provenance is unknown. But two etymologists have proposed origins of this tricky word. Friedrich Christian Diez, a German philologist (1794–1876), proposed an origin in the Latin word chorus, from Greek choros, noting that most early forms took /o/ as first vowel, corol, coral etc. Karl Heinrich Wilhelm Wackernagel (1806-1869), a German-Swiss philologist, first suggested the /l/ of carol stemmed from choraules, the name of the flute-player who sometimes accompanied a Greek chorus as it danced and sang choral odes in early Greek drama.

Other guesses include corolla Latin ‘garland, ring-shaped crown of flowers, coronet’ especially if the original meaning was ‘ring.’ This not-now-popular suggestion conceives that the dancers wore flower garlands in their hair as they danced and sang, and that the name of the garland became the name of the dance and the song. Maybe.

Early Citations of the Word Carol

Here’s a relevant English citation from CE 1387 “He saw a mayden . . .daunsynge in a carrole among other maydouns.”

Long ago a British folk story told of circles of upright stones, like Stonehenge but smaller, that claimed they began as a blasphemous ring-dance, by a party of girls who were turned into stone for dancing carols on a Sunday.

In CE 1600, William Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream wrote this line: “No night is now with hymne or carroll blest.”

How early did English speakers refer to Christmas carols? A famous printer of London with the wonderful name of Wynkyn de Worde published a book in CE 1521 entitled Christmasse Carolles.

Madonna and Child, Botticelli worshop, early 14th century, Convent of San Marco, Florence

How Carol Turned into Carrel

The carrel in a library, an individual study desk or stall, is from the same word carol. Libraries borrowed the word from medieval monasteries, where the carrel was a small alcove or cubicle for individual monks and nuns to read Holy Writ or to meditate. That sense of small enclosure developed from carol’s earliest meaning in French ‘ring’ or ‘circle.’ Carol also once meant precinct or small enclosed space, hence it became an apt word to name the little study carrels in a cloister.

More Citational Bounty

From a Wikipedia article on medieval dance, we glean these gems:

Some of the earliest mentions of the carol occur in the works of the French poet Chretien de Troyes in his series of Arthurian romances. In the wedding scene in Erec and Enide (about CE 1170)

“Puceles carolent et dancent,

Trestuit de joie feire tancent.”

“Maidens performed rounds and other dances, each trying to outdo the other in showing their joy.”

In The Knight of the Cart, (late CE 1170s) at a meadow where there are knights and ladies, various games are played while:

“Li autre, qui iluec estoient,

Redemenoient lor anfances,

Baules et queroles et dance;

Et chantent et tunbent et saillent.”

“Some others were playing at childhood games - rounds, dances and reels, singing, tumbling, and leaping.”

Happy indeed, with tiny Timothy pissed to his hat on cheap champagne

“I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Christmas gift suggestions: To your enemy, forgiveness. To an opponent, tolerance. To a friend, your heart. To a customer, service. To all, charity. To every child, a good example. To yourself, respect."

- Oren Arnold

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Nov. 15, 2010: On Twitter, Doug O'Neill, a happy buyer of my new Dobdob book, writes, "Even funnier flipping through it a second time around."

Thanks, Doug!

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