maryland | Search Online Etymology Dictionary

14 entries found.

U.S. state, named for Henrietta Maria (1609-1669), wife of English King Charles I. Related: Marylander.

city in Maryland, U.S., founded 1729, named for Cecilius Calvert (1605-1675), 2nd baron Baltimore, who held the charter for Maryland colony; the name is from a small port town in southern Ireland where the family had its seat, from Irish Baile na Tighe Mor, literally "townland of the big house." In old baseball slang, a Baltimore chop was a hit right in front of the plate that bounced high.

palatinate (n.)

"the office or province of a palatine ruler," 1650s, from palatine + -ate (1). In England and Ireland, a county palatine; also used of certain American colonies (Carolina, Maryland, Maine).

gandy dancer

"railroad maintenance worker," 1918, American English slang, of unknown origin; dancer perhaps from movements required in the work of tamping down ties or pumping a hand-cart, gandy perhaps from the name of a machinery belt company in Baltimore, Maryland.

Antietam

place name, eastern U.S., from an Algonquian word perhaps meaning "swift water;" the name occurrs in Pennsylvania and Ohio, but the best-known is a creek near Sharpsburg in Washington County, Maryland; site of a bloody American Civil War battle fought Sept. 17, 1862.

eastern (adj.)

Old English easterne "of the east, from the east; oriental; of the Eastern Orthodox Church; of the eastern part of the globe," from east + -erne, suffix denoting direction. Cognate with Old Saxon ostroni, Old High German ostroni, Old Norse austroenn. Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia so called from 1620s.

Camp David

U.S. presidential retreat near Thurmont, Maryland, built 1939 as Hi-Catoctin, in reference to the name of the mountains around it; called Shangri-La by F.D. Roosevelt, after the mythical hard-to-get-to land in the novel "Lost Horizon;" named Camp David by Eisenhower in 1953 for his grandson, born 1947. The Camp David Accords were signed there Sept. 17, 1978.

Mason-Dixon Line

by 1779, named for Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, English astronomers who surveyed (1763-7) the disputed boundary between the colonial holdings of the Penns (Pennsylvania) and the Calverts (Maryland). It became the technical boundary between "free" and "slave" states after 1804, when the last slaveholding state above it (New Jersey) passed its abolition act. As the line between "the North" and "the South" in U.S. culture, it is attested by 1834.

burgess (n.)

c. 1200, burgeis "citizen of a borough, inhabitant of a walled town," from Old French borjois (Modern French bourgeois), from Late Latin burgensis (see bourgeois). Applied from late 15c. to borough representatives in Parliament and used later in Virginia and Maryland to denote members of the legislative body, while in Pennsylvania and Connecticut it meant "member of the governing council of a local municipality."

glade (n.)

"clear, open space in a woods," late 14c., of uncertain origin, perhaps from Middle English glode (c. 1300), from Old Norse glaðr "bright" (see glad). If so, the original meaning could be "bright (because open) space in a wood" (compare French clairière "glade," from clair "clear, bright;" German Lichtung "clearing, glade," from Licht "light"). American English sense of "tract of low, marshy grassland" (as in Everglades) recorded by 1789, perhaps 1724 in place names (in Maryland).

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