• affray •
Printable Version Pronunciation: ê-fray • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. A fray, a noisy quarrel. 2. A brawl or fight. 3. In law, the fighting of two or more persons in a public place. (A fight in private is an assault and battery.)
Notes: Words that begin with A are always at risk of reanalysis, the misinterpretation of the initial A as the article a. Orange was originally Arabic narange but "a narange" was reanalyzed as "an orange". Apron comes from Old French naperon "small tablecloth", reanalyzed from "a napron" to "an apron". Affray, too, is being reanalyzed as "a fray" and is being replaced by fray. Why not keep the original?
In Play: The meaning of today's Good Word varies from that of an argument to that of a short fight. This is more likely a heated argument: "Our team lost the game when our high scorer, Stretch Hightower, got into a nasty affray with the referee and was sent to the showers." In this example, the implication is a physical altercation: "Brea Little intervened and very narrowly averted an affray when Al Pacca called Perry Yare a quiche-eating sissy."
Word History: Middle English, from Old French effrei, from esfraier "to disturb". It all started with PIE *pri- "to love", as in Russian prij-atel' "friend". In the Germanic languages, of course, the [p] became [f], so it turns up in English free and German Frieden "peace". An ancestor of German Frieden seems to have been borrowed into Gaulish Latin, perhaps *ex-fried-are "to remove from peacefulness", which then went on to become French esfraier. By the way, this same French word is the source of afraid, which originally meant "disturbed". (Today's Good Word comes courtesy of Luciano Eduardo de Oliveira, who haunts the Alpha Agora in the guise of The Brazilian Dude. Click here to meet him there today.)
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