Daring to Endure the Use of Derring-do During the Day

What does derring-do mean? If it’s related to daring, why is it spelled differently?

Derring-do is a noun that means doing a daring or heroic action. It’s been an English word for a long time, since the 1300s, and was originally dorrying don, two words that literally meant “daring to do.” So it IS related to daring.

But in Middle English the present participle form of the verb was durring. The Middle English equivalent of dares was durren. Dare in Old English was durran, and the verb was conjugated as darr, dearst, dear in the singular. A form of the past tense of dearst, dorste, survives in the word durst, an increasingly rarely used past tense of dare. The verb dare means having the courage or boldness to do something.

So how do we get from durring to dorrying to derring? How do we get from verb to noun? Remember, at that time English was not written much, and it was not until the King James Version of the Bible and the writings of Shakespeare that much standardization of spelling came to take place.

In the 1500s durring was misspelled as derrynge and the poet Edmund Spenser mistook it for a noun rather than a verb as it had been. It is Spenser who attached the chivalric meaning, that of a hero performing daring acts.

It was not until the 1590s that the verb dare (however it was spelled at the time) also developed a noun sense.

In case you’re wondering, and why would you, the preposition during comes from a different word, from duren, that in the late 1300s meant “to last or endure” according to etymonline.com. The present participle form of duren was durand, and it is from durand that we get during. So when we say during the day it is a vestige of the old meaning of “while the day lasts or endured. The English got the word duren from the Old French word durer which the Old French got from the Latin word for endure, durare, the word from which we get our word endure. The phrase “during the day” is (again, etymonline.com:) “a transference into English of a Latin ablative absolute (compare durante bello ‘during (literally ‘enduring’) the war”).” Don't you love the ablative absolute? Absolutely.

And while we’re there, the adjective enduring, meaning lasting, came to English in the 1530s, while the verb endure had arrived in the late 1300s. Endure, meaning to hold out against or to last through, came from the Old French word endurer, which meant to make hard or harden or bear and tolerate. The Old French got the word from the Latin word indurare, meaning to make hard. In Late Latin the word meant to “harden (the heart) against.” My most enduring recollection of the phrase “harden the heart” is from the King James Version account of the exodus of the Jews where it is used 12 times in Exodus (three times in chapters 10 and 14, twice in chapters 8 and 9, and once each in chapters 4 and 11.)

So dare to endure the use of derring-do during the day.