A photo pointing up at a tree and taken with the camera spinning, providing a representation of dizziness or vertigo
17 October 2022
Dizzy is a good example of a word whose meaning has shifted since its coinage. It now generally refers to a sense of vertigo and a tendency to fall down, but originally it meant foolish or in error. That early sense is not entirely lost—we see it contexts like the misogynistic dizzy blonde—but it has largely been overtaken by the newer meaning.
Dizzy traces back to the Old English dysig. We see it in the translation of Matthew 7:26:
And ælc þæra þe gehyrþ ðas mine word and þa ne wyrcð se biþ gelic þam dysigan men, þe getimbrode hys hus ofer sand-ceosel
(But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not implement them is like the dizzy man who built his house on sand washed by the tide.)
In Old English it was also a verb meaning to act foolishly or rashly, dysigian. Here is the verb in a poetic translation of Psalm 94:10 (Psalm 95 in the Hebrew and Protestant Bibles):
Nu ic feowertig folce þyssum
wintra rimes wunade neah,
aa and symble cwæð, and eac swa oncneow,
þæt hi on heortan hyge dysegedan.(I have now lived near this people for forty winters, always and ever saying, and also observing, that they dizzied in their heart’s intentions.)
The vertigo sense appears during the Middle English period. The Oxford English Dictionary places this use of dizzy, found in the anonymous poem The Pricke of Conscience, written 1325–50, under the vertigo sense, but given that the context is dementia caused by old age, it would seem the original foolish sense is more apt.
Bot als tyte als a man waxes alde,
Þan waxes his kynde wayke and calde,
Þan chaunges his complexcion
And his maners and his condicion;
Than waxes his hert hard and hevy,
And his heved feble and dysy;
Þan waxes his gaste seke and sare,
And his face rouncles, ay mare and mare.(But also quickly as a man grows old,
Then his nature grows weak and cold,
Then changes his complexion
And his manners and his condition;
Then his heart grows hard and heavy,
And his head feeble and dizzy;
Then his spirit grows sick and sore,
And his face wrinkles, always more and more.)
But we definitely see the vertigo sense by the early sixteenth century. It appears in John Skelton’s poem Magnyfycence, published posthumously in 1533
I blunder I bluster I blowe and I blother
I make on the one day, and I marre on the other
Busy, busy, and euer busy,
I daunce up and downe tyll I am dyssy
I can fynde fantasyes where none is
I wyll not have it / so I will have it this
Sources:
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. dysig, adj., dysigian, v.
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew in Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian Versions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1858, Matthew 7:26, 60. Archive.org.
Metrical Psalm 94:10. Old English Psalms. Patrick P. O’Neill, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 42. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 374.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. dusi(e, adj. and n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. dizzy, adj., dizzy v.
The Pricke of Conscience (1325–50). Richard Morris, ed. Berlin: A. Asher for the Philological Society, 1863, lines 766–73.
Skelton, John. Magnyfycence. J. Rastell, 1533, sig. Civ.v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Photo credit: THX0477. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.