Swallow — From Old English to English | etymologist.ai
swallow
/ˈswɒl.əʊ/·verb·Before 900 CE — Old English swelgan attested in Beowulf and early glossaries·Established
Origin
From OE swelgan, a strong Class III verb (swelgan/swealg/swulgon) that lost its ablaut in Middle English; cognate with German schwelgen (to revel), which kept the gulping metaphor and ran with it.
Definition
To cause food or drink to pass from the mouth down through the throat into the stomach — from Old English swelgan, a strong verb Class III that lost its ablaut in Middle English.
The Full Story
Old Englishpre-900 CEwell-attested
The verb 'swallow' descends from OldEnglish swelgan, a strong verb of class III meaning 'to swallow, gulp down, devour, absorb'. As a class III strong verb its principal partsfollowed the ablaut pattern swelgan (infinitive), swealg (past singular), swulgon (past plural), swolgen (past participle) — the same alternation seen in drink/drank/drunk. This paradigm was levelled during Middle English, giving
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OldEnglish swelgan conjugated like 'drink': swealg in the past tense, swulgon in the plural — the same vowel-shift pattern as drank/drunk. By the fifteenth century those strong forms were gone, replaced by the weak 'swallowed'. Meanwhile in German the cognate schwelgen forgot the gullet entirely and came to mean
German schwelgen (to revel, feast, indulge) carry the root forward, though German has undergone a notable semantic drift: from the physical act of swallowing to the pleasure of
and self-indulgence.
Behind Proto-Germanic stands PIE *swelk- or *swelg- (to swallow, gulp). Crucially, the bird name 'swallow' (OE swealwe) is a completely separate lexical item from a different root — the two words are etymological strangers despite their identical modern form, a classic case of homonymy through phonological convergence. Key roots: *swelk- / *swelg- (Proto-Indo-European: "to swallow, gulp down"), *swelganą (Proto-Germanic: "to swallow, devour, engulf — ancestor of OE swelgan, German schwelgen, Dutch zwelgen").