You've heard the word every December for as long as you can remember. And if you're big on Christmas, you yourself have probably even used the word in song. Yet every year around Christmastime, you still can't help but ask yourself, “What the hell does wassail even mean, anyway?” Well, as the lyrics to the old carol demonstrate, the word in question can be used as both a verb and a noun, and since the noun came first in this etymological family tree, we might as well begin there. Surprisingly, wassail started out in Old English as a two-word imperative phrase: was hal, which was derived from the Old Norse ves heill and basically meant “be in good health” or “be prosperous.” By the beginning of the twelfth century, the English phrase had evolved to become waes haeil (sometimes spelled wes heil), and instead of being a friendly salutation or a cordial acknowledgment of another's departure, it was now a drinking-party toast that meant “to your good health” or “to your good fortune.” It took about another century for the phrase to coalesce into the single noun wassail—the spelling of which varied greatly at first—and by circa 1300, the word had taken on the secondary meaning of “the drink used for toasting, especially the spiced ale used in Christmas celebrations” and was also gaining currency as a verb meaning “to take part in a wassail or a wassail-like toast.” Around 1600, our old friend Shakespeare, who was writing Hamlet at the time, gave the noun a tertiary meaning, “riotous drinking or drunken revelry,” and soon after, the verb took on the related secondary sense of “to engage in drunken revelry.” But it wasn't until the mid-eighteenth century that the verb came to be associated with caroling at Christmastime, and this was likely because many carolers, in an effort to keep warm as they went singing from door to door, brought with them some heated wassail or a similar alcoholic beverage and tended to get a little rowdy as the night—and the drink—wore on. (Some sources say that it was the people on the receiving end of the songs and well-wishing, not the carolers, who provided the warmed libation.) When the nineteenth century rolled around, however, alcohol became less a part of the caroling activities each year, and the verb wassail thus came to mean simply “to go from house to house and sing carols at Christmas.”
©2020 Michael R. Gates
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