• fell •
Pronunciation: fel • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: Pelt, hide, animal skin with the hair.
Notes: Today's pronunciation fits a noun (today's word) and another meaning "a stony, barren hill, a verb meaning "cause to fall" as 'to fell a tree' and the past tense of fall, an adjective meaning "fiercely sinister, lethal", as 'one fell blow'. It is a lexical orphan except for a few compounds like fell-ill "hidebound (cattle disease)", fell-ware "hides and skins", and fellmonger "a dealer in animal skins".
In Play: Any animal skin with hair on it is a fell: "Phil Anders is by any measure a wolf in sheep's fell." 'Flesh and fell' is the name of a Dutch rock band and an archaic phrase once used in the sense of "entirely": "The good years shall devour them, flesh and fell." Shakespeare King Lear (1643).
Word History: Today's Good Word was spelled fel in Old English, which obtained it from PIE pel-/pol- "skin, hide, membrane" via its Germanic ancestors. The same word underlies Old English filmen "membrane", which is today film. The same PIE source provided German Fell "pelt" and Dutch vel "pelt", and Swedish fjall "fish scale". The [p] did not change to [f] elsewhere among IE languages, so we find Latin pellis "skin", from which came French peau, Portuguese pele, Spanish piel, and Italian pelle. Lithuanian pleve "skin" and Czech plena "diaper" may have descended from metathesized versions of the same PIE word. (David Myer suggested we do fellmonger, but when I researched the first component of this compound, I found it so remarkable I decided to run it by itself. Thank you, David, just the same.)