The roots of the noun autumn wind all the way back to the Latin autumnus, which meant “harvest time.” The Latin passed into Old French as autompne, and in the late fourteenth century, Middle English borrowed the Old French term but altered its form to autumpne. Then around 1590, roughly a century after Middle English gave way to modern English, the word's spelling again changed to become the contemporary autumn. The synonym fall—now used primarily in the United States and there the preferred term for the harvest season—came about in the mid-seventeenth century as a shortening of the phrase fall of the leaf, itself an obvious though somewhat poetic alternative to autumn that had been in common use since circa 1540.
©2022 Michael R. Gates
