The Etymology of Cobblestone
Cobblestone is one of the few English words whose meaning is intact since 1395, when Middle English texts first record cobel-ston for a rounded paving stone. The first element comes from Old English cob, a native word for a lump, head, or rounded mass — a meaning preserved in cob (a male swan), corn-cob (the rounded inner core of an ear of maize), and cobnut (a hazelnut). A cobble was a small cob; a cobblestone was a small rounded stone, the right size to set into a road by hand without mortar. (The verb to cobble together — to assemble roughly — comes from the cobbler’s craft of patching shoes from odd lumps of leather, a parallel use of the same root.) German captures the same image with Kopfsteinpflaster, head-stone paving; both languages reach for a rounded body-part metaphor. Cobblestone roads vanished from most modern cities in the twentieth century, but the word has outlived the surface it named.