Sign posted at the entrance to Maine’s Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park. A wooden sign giving the park’s name in the foreground with trees in the background.
7 June 2021
The word neck, like the common name of many body parts, can be traced back to Old English, that is the language as it was spoken prior to the Norman Conquest. In this case, the Old English word is hnecca. Here is the word as it is used in the Old English translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care. The Old English text dates to the late tenth century:
Be ðæm wæs suiðe wel gecueden ðurh ðone witgan: Wa ðæm ðe willað under ælcne elnbogan lecggean pyle & bolster under ælcne hneccan menn mid to gefonne. Se legeð pyle under ælces monnes elnbogan, se ðe mid to gefonne. Se legeð pyle under ælces monnes elnbogan, se ðe mid liðum oliccungum wile læcnian ða men ðe sigað on ðisses middangeardes lufan, oððæt hie afeallað of hiera ryhtwisnessum.
(Of that was very well spoken through the prophet: “Woe to those who wish to lay a pillow under every person’s elbow and a bolster under each neck to ensnare people with.” He lays a pillow under every person’s elbow who with soft flatteries wishes to heal who sink into love of this world, until they fall from their righteousness.)
Gregory’s original Latin reads sub capite (below the head).
In the fourteenth century, neck began to be used metaphorically for things that are narrow or tapering, especially a narrow passage or channel. Here is a passage from John Trevisa’s late fourteenth-century translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things) that uses neck in reference to a bottle:
Fiola haþ þe name of glas, for glas hatte fila in gru and is a litel vessel wiþ a brood botme and a smal nekke.
(Fiola has the name glass, for a glass is fila in Greek and is a little vessel with a broad bottom and small neck.)
Another example is neck being used to refer the narrow part of a stringed instrument, like a violin. From Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-English dictionary:
Manche: m. The haft, belue, or handle of a toole; also, the necke of a musicall Instrument; also, a mans toole.
Note the French word is also slang for a different body part.
By the eighteenth century, neck started to be used for narrow bits of terrain. Here is an August 1707 article from the London Gazette describing the fighting during the War of the Spanish Succession that used neck to refer to a mountain pass:
Their Cannon did great Execution; and Fort Louis was so shatter’d, that it could not hold out four Days longer. Those Letters add, That Monsieur Medavi, with what Troops he could get together, was to advance towards the Neck of the Mountains at Cuers; and that Prince Eugene had march’d from the Camp with a Detachment of 3000 Horse and 2000 Grenadiers upon some important Design.
Daniel Defoe used neck to refer to a strait or narrow body of water in his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe:
When I came down from my Apartment in the Tree, I look’d about me again, and the first thing I found was the Boat, which lay as the Wind and the Sea had toss’d her up upon the Land, about two Miles on my right Hand, I walk’d as far as I could upon the Shore to have got to her, but found a Neck or Inlet of Water between me and the Boat, which was about half a Mile broad, so I came back for the present, being more intent upon getting at the Ship, where I hop’d to find something for my present Subsistence.
And we get neck of wood, referring to a narrow strip of forest, in Arthur Young’s 1780 A Tour of Ireland. Here he described the grounds of Castle Caldwell, in County Fermanagh in what is now Northern Ireland:
This wood is perfectly a deep shade, and has an admirable effect. At the other end it joins another woody promontory, in which the lawn opens beautifully among the scattered trees, and just admits a partial view of the house half obscured; carrying your eye a little more to the left, you see three other necks of wood, which stretch into the lake, generally giving a deep shade, but here and there admitting the water behind the stems and through the branches of the trees; all of this bounded by cultivated hills, and those backed by distant mountains.
And in nineteenth-century America, we see the phrase neck of the woods expand metaphorically again, referring to a neighborhood, area, or region. From the horseracing paper the Spirit of the Times of 15 June 1839, where a correspondent uses neck of the woods in this way, claiming that it is a phrase common in Indiana (i.e., the Hoosier State):
Many of your valuable hints to race course proprietors have been practised upon by Col. Oliver, and he seems to have imbibed a goodly portion of your “Spirit,” besides bringing into requisition the genuine essence of his own. He is emphatically, as they say in Arkansas, (I ask Pete’s pardon,) the “supreme alligator” of everything that savors the advance. If yourself and Oliver don’t make folks open their eyes in this neck of woods (as we say in the Hooshier State), it will be because they have none to open.
That’s how a thousand-year-old word for a body part came to refer to one’s neighborhood.
Sources:
Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. London: Adam Islip, 1611, s.v. Manche. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. London: W. Taylor, 1719, 46. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. hnecca.
London Gazette, 18–21 August 1707, 1. NewspaperArchive.com.
“Louisville (Ky.) Spring Races” (6 June 1839). The Spirit of the Times, 15 June 1839, 175. American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 3.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. neck, n.1.
Sweet, Henry, ed. King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care. Early English Text Society 45. London: N. Trübner, 1871, 143. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 20.
Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things, vol. 2 of 3. M.C. Seymour, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, Book 19, 1376. London, British Library, MS Additional 27944.
Young, Arthur. A Tour in Ireland, vol. 1 of 2. Dublin: George Bonham, 1780, 266. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Photo credit: Daveynin, 2015. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.