Take wedlock, which looks obvious enough — it’s the state of being joined in marriage. But that “lock” in wedlock is a red herring; the Old English word was wedlac, formed from wed, meaning “pledge, security,” and lac, a suffix indicating “actions or proceedings.” Wedlac, “marriage,” was literally the act of making the vows.
The old sense of the noun wed, “something pledged or pawned,” survived into the 19th century, at least (with the spelling wad) in Sir Walter Scott’s vocabulary: “I determined he should remain a wad, or hostage, for my safe back-coming.” But the suffix lac lacked staying power. By the 14th century, says the Oxford English Dictionary, it was all but extinct, and folk etymology soon turned the mysterious wedlac into plain wedlock. The ball-and-chain jokes were not far behind: Samuel Butler, in 1664, observed that “Wed lock without Love, some say, Is but a Lock without a Key,” and he probably wasn’t the first to make such a jest.
Then there’s bridegroom, which began its career as Old English brydguma, or “bride’s man.” After a few centuries, brydguma and brydgome and its variations retired from the scene; when the word was resuscitated, in the 1500s, the noun gome (meaning “man”) had gone extinct. So brydgome became bridegroom — a much more transparent word, since “groom” could mean “lad” at the time.
This development was fine with most people — Samuel Johnson put bridegroom into his 1755 dictionary without complaint — but Noah Webster, hard at work reforming American English, was nettled by the inaccuracy. He preferred bridegoom, says Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, and “he went so far as to enter and define bridegoom in his Dictionary of 1828.” Webster won some of his word battles, but his bridegoom campaign, luckily, was a bust. ( Groom for bridegroom has been called inelegant, but it’s surely an improvement on goom.)
