Why is it called fall? The fall of the leaf
It is called fall because it is the season when the leaves fall. The word began as a longer phrase, “the fall of the leaf”, in 16th-century England. Americans did not invent it. The English used it first, and later mostly dropped it in favor of “autumn”, while Americans kept it.
From “the fall of the leaf”
The lexicographers at Dictionary.com put the earliest records of “fall” as the name of the season in the 1500s. “The name is thought to originate in the phrase the fall of the leaf,” they write, “in reference to the time of year when deciduous trees shed their leaves.” The etymology writer John Kelly, on his site Mashed Radish, gives the first recorded use as 1545, in that full form, “fall of the leaf”.
Spring has a matching story. Dictionary.com notes that spring is thought to come from “spring of the leaf”, the time when everything is growing. For a while English had a neat pair: leaves spring up, leaves fall down.
Harvest came first
Neither fall nor autumn is the oldest English name for the season. That was harvest. Kelly writes that “by the 16th century, both autumn and fall were displacing the original term for the season, harvest”, a word from Old English that the Oxford English Dictionary records as early as 902.
Добавить в заметки чтобы посмотреть позже?Autumn is a borrowing from French, which took it from the Latin autumnus. According to Kelly, its earliest English record is in a translation by Chaucer from 1374. So by the 1500s England had two rival words for the season, one borrowed from Latin through French, one plain English.
England dropped it, America kept it
For a while both lived side by side in England. Webster’s dictionary of 1913 lists, among the meanings of fall, “The season when leaves fall from trees; autumn”, and its example comes from the poet Dryden: “What crowds of patients the town doctor kills, / Or how, last fall, he raised the weekly bills.”
Then the British took a different path. Dictionary.com says fall “was commonly used in England until about the end of the 1600s, when it was ousted by autumn.” Kelly notes that fall and autumn were both pushing out harvest around the time the British began settling North America. In America, fall stayed. Dictionary.com adds that fall “became more common in the US by the late 1800s”.
Webster’s 1913 entry for autumn shows the split in its own wording. It calls autumn the season “often called ‘the fall’”, and notes that in America autumn popularly means September, October and November, while in England, according to Johnson, it meant August, September and October.
Both words are English
So when a British speaker teases an American for saying fall, the joke runs the wrong way. Fall is a home-grown English word that Britain itself used for well over a century. Autumn is the borrowing from French that won out there. Americans, like their dictionaries, still use both.