Sam's Personal Website
Somewhere between house and home.
Last week, I learned that the word "family" comes from Latin, and it's a relatively new addition to English. It entered English as a word for "household" in the 1300s. In ancient Rome, familia first refered to the slaves who lived in a household. Gradually it expanded to describe the economic unit of a household.
At the time, English had another word like family, hīred. That word meant household, retinue, troop, or descendents. German still has Heirat, meaning "marriage." In English, we still have hīred in "herd," a group of animals or the act of coralling them. Hīred descended from an earlier Germanic word hus, meaning "house," which likely described a collection of buildings — perhaps storerooms, for example, but probably not the actual space where people lived. (The living space was the razn, as in "ransack.")
The older Germanic word hus also spawned a Germanic word hyran, meaning "to receive into the house." English adopted this word, which was already closely related to hīred ("household") and put it to work to describe enlisting a servant for work.
Servants performed some of the first hourly paid work in the Middle Ages. As communal structures dissolved, replaced by the Roman family structure, households enlisted servants to perform jobs previously performed by members of the community. One of these servants might have been called a hīred-man.
So the act of "hiring" someone was initially an act of bringing someone into your household. (See my last post, on the related origin of the word wage.) The new feudal idea of "family" (group of servants) and "house" (a place to work) displaced the ideas hīred (a community) and razn (a place to rest).
Księga pamiątkowa dla Profesora Stanisława Stachowskiego z okazji jego 85 urodzin * * * A Festschrift for Professor Stanisław Stachowski on the Occasion of His 85th Birthday