umpire

Word History: Had it not been for the linguistic process known as false splitting or juncture loss, the angry, anguished cry heard at sports events, "Kill the ump," could have been "Kill the nump." In the case of umpire we can almost see false splitting in action by studying the Middle English Dictionary entry for noumpere, the Middle English ancestor of our word. Noumpere comes from Old French nonper, made up of non, "not," and per, "equal." As an impartial arbiter of a dispute between two people, the umpire is not equivalent to or a partisan of either of them. In Middle English the earliest recorded form is noumper (about 1350); the earliest form without an n is owmpere, recorded in a document dated 1440. How the n was lost can be seen if we compare the sequence a noounpier in a text written in 1426-1427 with the sequence an Oumper from a text written probably around 1475. In an Oumper, the n has become attached to the indefinite article, giving us an instead of a and, eventually, umpire instead of numpire. The same sort of false splitting has altered the forms of other words as well. Apron, for example, used to be napron, and adder used to be nadder. The reverse process has also occurred in the history of English: words that originally began with vowels acquired an n from a preceding indefinite article. Nickname comes from an obsolete phrase an eke name, "an additional name." Newt comes from an eute. A variant of the Middle English word eute still survives as eft, "a newt."