A Roman, lead water pipe, c. 1–300 CE. The inscription indicates the pipe was produced by an imperial procurator aquarum (manager of waters).
29 December 2023
Lead is a soft, malleable, heavy metal with atomic number 82 and the symbol Pb. It has, of course, been known since antiquity, and the name traces back to Old English. Here is a reference to the metal in the description of Britain found at the beginning of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede wrote it in Latin c. 731, and the Old English translation dates to the late ninth century:
Hit hafað eac pis land sealtseapas; & hit hafap hat water, & hat bado ælcere yldo & hade ðurh todælede stowe gescræpe. Swylce hit is eac berende on wecga orum ares & isernes, leades & seolfres.
(This land, it also has salt springs; & it has hot water, & and hot baths in various places suitable for all ages & sexes. Moreover, it is also producing in quantity ores of copper & iron, lead & silver.)
The Old English word comes from a Proto-Germanic root, *lauda-, which in turn comes from the Proto-Celtic *flowdyo-. The Celtic root is also related to the Latin word for the metal, plumbum, which is the source for the modern chemical symbol.
Interestingly, the name of the metal may not originally have been an Indo-European one. It may come from the Proto-Indo-European *pleu- (to flow), referring to lead’s low melting point and malleability. But there is a problem in that the PIE root can explain the Celtic word, but it cannot explain the /m/ in the Latin. It may, therefore, be a loanword into the Indo-European languages. There may, for example, be a connection to the root of the metal’s name in the Tamazight (i.e., Berber) languages, *buldun. But exactly what that connection might be is probably unknowable, if it exists at all.
Sources:
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, vol. 1 of 4. Thomas Miller, ed. Early English Text Society O.S. 95. London: Oxford UP, 1890, 1.1, 26. HathiTrust Digital Library.
Etymological Dictionary of Latin Online, 2002, s.v. plumbum. Brill Online.
Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic Online, 1995, s.v. flowdyo-. Brill Online.
Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic Online, 2009, s.v. lauda-. Brill Online.
Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. lead, n.1.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. Wellcome Collection. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.