Tunnel

When we went on train journeys as children, going through a tunnel always seemed quite exciting – I suppose we led dull lives compared to children now with all their sophisticated ways of exploring the world without leaving home! We had books and films at the cinema… we didn’t have a TV until I was a teenager!

I’d never really thought about the word ‘tunnel’ until I read an article about its origins. I guess I vaguely thought it was an old word, that when castles were besieged and the enemy dug underneath the walls they were digging a tunnel… well, they were digging but apparently they didn’t have the word tunnel to explain what they were doing.

The actual word as a word was, as many words, borrowed from the French ‘tonnelle’ which wasn’t a tunnel either, but a net, ‘une tonne’ and thence a netting device for catching birds, particularly partridge. The word ‘tonne’ actually meant cask and was just used to describe the shape of the partridge catching net. ‘Tonne’ though, might have come from the same origin as the word which became ‘tun’ in English, a barrel.

Even when ‘tunnel’ arrived in English in the early fifteenth century, there was a delay of a couple of hundred years before it also meant an underground passage… this previously had been a ‘mine’. So in the 1660’s we had tunnel, and in another two years the French borrowed it back, ‘un tunnel’.

Tunnel has also been added onto other words: