How ‘hour’ ticked into our language

‘Why is there water all over the bathroom floor?’ asked my husband, without doing anything about it. It was my fault. During a bank holiday soak, I heard the Radio 4 book serialisation of Hands of Time by Rebecca Struthers say that ‘the origin of the modern word hour’ is the Egyptian god Horus. I rocketed up a few inches, like a surprised killer whale, then flopped back down, displacing a few cubic inches of water each side.

It’s funny how ordinary words attract erroneous stories. Hour does not, of course, come from Horus. Few English words come from ancient Egyptian; pharaoh and oasis are exceptions. Hour derives from Norman French houre, from Latin hora, itself from Greek hōra, going back to an Indo-European root signifying ‘season’, giving us year and the Germans Jahr. We started using hour after the Norman conquest, the Old English being tid, ‘tide’. The sea’s tide was a later development of the same word; ‘time and tide wait for no man’ originally used tide in the sense ‘time’, not ‘sea-tide’.

Anyway, why should anyone think hour came from Horus? The falcon-headed god had one eye the sun and the other the moon, but that does not get us there. Neither the Egyptians nor pre-modern etymologists suggested Horus related to hora. Good old Isidore of Seville in his 7th-century Etymologies makes a stab at the origin of hora, ‘hour’, being the same as that of ora ‘boundary’, though it isn’t. Sir Thomas Browne, 1,000 years later, never mentions Horus that I can find. That does not stop internet language chat sites. One advocate of the hour-Horus connection spoils it by then explaining the origin of a religious minister: ‘Min was the common name of the moon, in fact it is where we derive the word moon. And Ster, is really star.