Boil

The word (boil, v.) is also from French, from the word boiller. While it is a regular verb in the English language as boil, it is an irregular verb in the French original boiller.

Boiling is when one puts liquid over heat and bubbles emerge, creating rapid evaporation. Its purpose is often to cook food, but it is also used quite universally to purify water.

The word boil seems to come to us from the French during the Middle English period, after the Norman Conquest in 1066, since its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1225's St. Margarete: "þo hit boillede faste." Roughly translated, this means 'then it boiled strongly/quickly."

We can see the similarity to Modern English words here: the thorn character at the beginning of þo is similar to the <th> in then. The word hit is basically it with an h (and h-loss occurred, not uniformly, throughout the following periods of English language history). Boiled is almost the same word, but with different endings and one less l, though it remains a weak verb up until the present. The adverb faste has similar meanings to the fast of today: as in "It was fast" or "Hold fast to the sails me mateys."

Other forms of this word from the Middle English period include boille, boili, boile, boyle, and boyll. This reflects the overarching trend of the first two periods of English language history, which continued into the third: variations in spelling were many and great.

But the Old English speakers had another word for this state of liquid affairs: seoþen, which seems to have nothing in common with the French loan word. While (seethe, v.) is still used today in a figurate sense, Middle, Early Modern, and Modern English speakers use the word boil in cooking (Online Etymology Dictionary). This shows that French loan words replaced Old English words once they appeared, because the ruling class of the time period were predominantly French, or at least spoke French. These French words were not just for new ideas or concepts, they took the place of old ones (Van Gelderen).

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Online Etymology Dictionary. "Seethe, v." Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved October 2025 from: https://www.etymonline.com/word/seethe

Oxford English Dictionary. "Boil, v." Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition. Retrieved October 2025 from: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/boil_v?tab=meaning_and_use#17053588

Van Gelderen, Elly. "From Old to Middle English." A History of the English Language, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2006.

*AI image generated by Google Gemini.