(ŭmˈpīrˌ)
noun- Sports A person appointed to rule on plays, especially in baseball.
- A person appointed to settle a dispute that mediators have been unable to resolve; an arbitrator. See Synonyms at judge.
verb um·pired,
um·pir·ing,
um·pires verb, transitive To act as referee for; rule or judge.
verb, intransitive To be or act as a referee or an arbitrator.
Word History: Had it not been for the linguistic process known as false splitting or juncture loss, the angry, anguished cry “Kill the ump” could have been “Kill the nump.” In the case of
umpire we can almost see this process in action by studying the
Middle English Dictionary entry for
noumpere, the Middle English ancestor of our word.
Noumpere comes from the Old French
nonper, made up of
non, “not,” and
per, “equal”: as an impartial arbiter of a dispute between two people, the arbiter is not equivalent to or a partisan of either of them. In Middle English the earliest recorded form is
noumper (about 1350); the earliest dated form without an
n is
owmpere, from 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. The
n of
noumpere has here become attached to the indefinite article, giving us
an instead of
a and, eventually,
umpire instead of
*numpire. The same process of false splitting is responsible for the forms
apron and
adder, originally
napron and
naddre, as well as many other words that once began with
n. False splitting also caused some words that originally began with vowels to have an
n from a preceding indefinite article added on, such as
nickname (from the phrase
an eke name) and
newt (from
an eute).
