Ululate, keen & hanker

A fellow who mused that this must be the days of whine and roses admitted to hankering after the story behind the words ululate and keen, and also, he said, behind the verb hanker too.

While folks who ululate and keen may well count on hankies to staunch their tears, we've been unable to tie these terms together; they are all over the linguistic map.

Ululate first appeared in the early 17th century. Meaning "to wail" or "howl," it traces back to Latin, and was coined in imitation of the vocalizations it denotes.

Keen comes from Old Irish "I lament, weep." The noun keen, naming a lamentation for the dead uttered in a loud wailing voice or sometimes in a wordless cry, first appeared in English print in 1830. 15 years later, the verb keen followed.

Are you wondering whether folks weren't lamenting, keening, and bewailing well before the 1600s? They were indeed. Wail came in around the 14th century. While wail hails back to Old Norse, its Middle English kin is suspected of being influenced by the now-archaic weilawai, an interjection used to express sorrow or lamentation.

As for hanker, that term meaning "have a strong or persistent desire for"; "yearn (after)," dates back to the early 1600s. Hanker is believed to come from the Dutch dialect hankeren, a verb whose original meaning was "to hang repeatedly."