We're Going to Oxword

I was sitting with some friends at dinner when one of them used the word flummox, which flummoxed everyone. I followed with bollox (mistakenly remembering it as a word ending in ox) and mentioned it would be a good source of words for my blog – words ending in ox.

So here we are. Words ending in ox. I had to exempt words ending in dox or are a combination of two words (e.g., muskox, dropbox, etc.). That limits it to a blog-able number: the aforementioned flummox, lummox, equinox, and (next week) bollox, which is actually spelled bollocks (I made a bollocks of the spelling).

So let’s begin. Flummox is a verb that means to confuse, confound, or bewilder. Etymonline.com designates it as a cant word.

Do not get flummoxed by the word cant; it is not the contraction of the words can and not, it is in its own right a word, meaning a word used by a particular class or group of people, often the “underworld” or “gangsters.” Cant came to English in the 1560s from the Old North French verb canter that meant “to sing, or chant.” The Old North French got it from the Latin word for sing, cantare. By the 1640s it referred to “the whining of beggars,” and by 1709 to “insincere talk,” according to etymonline.com, which also quotes John S. Farmer’s Foreward to the 1896 publication “Musa Pedestris”:

…Slang is universal, whilst Cant is restricted in use to certain classes of the community: thieves, vagrom men, and – well, their associates…. Slang boasts a quasi-respectibility denied to Cant, though Cant is frequently more enduring, its use continuing without variation of meaning for many generations.

Back to flummox. It came to English much later, in 1837, although its origin is not certain. Etymonline.com speculates that it probably came from “some forgotten British dialect.” It then suggests there are candidate clusters in Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, southern Cheshire and Sheffield. Etymonline.com then quotes the Oxford English Dictionary editors: “The formation seems to be onomatopoeic, expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily.” So the OED and Etymonline.com are flummoxed by the source of flummox.

The origin of lummox is also obscure, although it arrived in English usage slightly before flummox, in 1825. It is sourced as East Anglian slang, and may be from dumb ox influenced by lumbering. It is used of a clumsy or stupid person, depending on whether they are lumbering or stupid.

The other ox word for the day is equinox, the word used twice a year, when the sun crosses the plane of the earth’s equator, when at the equator the days and nights are of equal length. Equinoxes take place near March 21 and September 21. The March event is specifically the vernal equinox, while the September event is the autumnal equinox. (Vernal and autumnal will have to wait.) Equinox came to English in the late 1300s either from the Old French word equinoce or from the Medieval Latin word equinoxium, that means equality of night and day.