The Long Story of Eke Out

Hello,

If anything is in short supply, it’s important to eke it out until you can replenish supplies. This usually happens in my house on a Wednesday when my offspring stare into the fridge, despairing of finding any food before I buy more groceries the next day. The parents amongst you will know that by the end of Friday we’re back to the cry of “There’s no food!”

Don’t forget to eke out the last of the wine…

Samuel Johnson, in the plan for his famous 1755 dictionary, explains that to eke out anything is to lengthen it beyond its true dimensions by a low trick. That’s not how I’d use the expression today, so where does its history lie?

The verb eke arrived in mainstream English around the year 1200 when it meant to increase or lengthen. It came from eken which was used in northern England and the East Midlands. They had it from ecan (and a few variant spellings) in Old English where it meant to increase. It’s likely that it came from aukan, a Proto-Germanic word which provides cousin words in Norse, Danish, Frisian, Saxon, Old High German, and Gothic so there was a lot of eking going on back in the day.

The Germanic word had its own roots in aug, a Proto Indo European word also meaning to increase. Eke goes a long way into the linguistic past and clearly all languages needed a term for increasing something.

Eke had a second meaning in Old English – to get with great difficulty. It’s possible that both meanings combined to give us the way we eke today. Since the late 1500s we’ve had the expression to eke out, meaning to make your supplies last longer. This refers to lengthening, but also has an implied idea that to do so would be difficult.

Now we almost never use eke with its core meaning of increasing or lengthening, but we certainly still eke out supplies, as demonstrated by my hungry offspring staring into the fridge.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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