In a Word: Surprise Party

You might be, well, surprised by the history of “surprise”

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Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

When I was young, surprise was a word I often had trouble spelling. Where I’m from, we don’t really pronounce that first r, so I would erroneously just drop it from the word. Even today, I have to stop and think about it.

What I think about is the word’s etymology. Those first three letters, sur-, are a fairly common prefix meaning “over or above”; we find it surname, surcharge, surrealism, and surface, to name a few. Remembering that helps me get that first r in there every time.

Sur- came to English through French (quelle surprise!) and traces back to the Latin adverb and preposition super “over, above,” which itself gets used as a combining form in English even more than sur-.

The Old French word surprise entered English unchanged (at least in spelling) in the 14th century; it was the past participle of the verb sorprendre “to overtake, seize, invade.” In that word, after the initial “over” prefix, we get prendre “to take,” which traces to the Latin prehendere “to grasp or seize,” which means surprise is etymologically related to a number of words about grasping, both physically and metaphorically, including apprehend, comprehend, and prehensile.

You might have noticed that “invade” is one of the senses of the Old French surprise. When we think of a surprise today, invasion isn’t what we think of. But when the word first found purchase in English, it was in a military context. A surprise was an unexpected attack on troops or seizure of a place. Today, we’d call that a surprise attack, but only because surprise took on the more common civilian sense.

That sense didn’t take long in coming, though: William Caxton used surprise in the sense “to affect suddenly with a particular emotion” (and not necessarily a good one) as early as 1490.

The military sense took a while to fade, though. The first surprise parties, in the early 1800s, weren’t joyous occasions; they were stealthy military detachments, in a Seal Team Six kind of way. You wouldn’t want to be the subject of a surprise party, because it meant you would have to fight for your freedom, if not your life.

Thankfully, by the mid-1850s, civilian surprise parties were becoming joyous celebrations involving streamers and noisemakers rather than rifles and knives. A nice improvement, if you ask me.

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