2021-02-14
ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด T – Timber & timbre
แนะนำการใช้ ตามที่ส่วนใหญ่ใช้ แต่ละท้องถิ่น
ความหมาย อาจผันแปร ตาม ตำแหน่ง/หน้าที่ ในประโยค
Dictionary.com
ออกเสียง Timber = ‘TIM-ber’
ออกเสียง timbre = TAM-ber’ – French pronunciation = ‘TAN-bruh’
Abused, Confused, & Misused Words by Mary Embree
Timber = wood, especially when suitable for building purposes:
Stack the timber next to the house.
Not to be confused with:
timbre = the characteristic quality of a sound:
The timbre of his voice was unique.
Dictionary.com
VOCAB BUILDER
What does timber mean?
Timber refers to wood used for building materials.
Timber can be used to refer to wood at different stages of processing.
Sometimes, it refers to the trees in a wooded area that will be cut for use.
Other times, it means trees that have already been cut down
but not yet processed into planks and other forms to build with.
And other timesit refers to the wood after it has been processed
(a more common word for this is lumber).
Timber is most commonly used as a mass noun,
meaning it is a singular noun that refers to multiple things
and does not get pluralized.
Example: Those trucks are bringing freshly cut timber to the mill.
Where does timber come from?
If you cut open the word timber and count the rings inside,
you’ll find that it’s a very old word
—it’s been in use since at least the 900s.
It comes from an Old English word that
originally meant “house”or “building material.”
It is related to the Old Norse word timbr (which has the same meaning)
and the Greek word demein (meaning “to build”).
Timber usually refers to wood for building materials,
but its specific definition varies slightlyfrom place to place.
In the United States and Canada,
timber is used to describe trees that have been cut down
but haven’t yet been processed into planks or boards (which are called lumber).
In the United Kingdom and Australia,
timber is the word used for any wood that will be used in construction.
Of course, shouting timber! is also a fun way to warn people
that a tree is falling or about to fall.
It has been used this way since at least the 1910s.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Timber and Timbre
Timber and timbre are two similar-looking words
that appear in very different contexts.
At least most of the time.
Timber traces back to an Old English word
initially meaning “house”or “building”
that alsocame to mean “building material,” “wood,” and “trees”or “woods.”
Timbersare large squared lengths of wood
used for building a house or a boat.
In British English, timber is also used as a synonym for lumber.
Metaphorical senses followed after centuries of the word’s use:
the word used for building material became a word meaning “material” or “stuff”
in general(“it’s best-seller timber”)
and came also to refer to the qualities of character, experience, or intellect (“managerial timber”).
And, of course, there’s also the interjectional use of “timber!”
as a cry to warn of a falling tree;
the fact that most people know this despite few of them ever having deployed
the word in such a situation is almost certainly due to cartoons.
Timbre is French in origin, which is apparent in its pronunciation:
it is often pronounced\TAM-ber\
and, with a more French-influenced second syllable, \TAM-bruh\.
The French ancestorof timbre was borrowed at three different timesinto English, each time with a different meaning,
each time reflecting the evolution that the word had made in French.
The first two meanings timbre had in English
(it referred to a kind of drum and to the crest on a coat of arms)
are now too obscure for entry in this dictionary,
but its third meaning survives.
Timbre in modern English generally refers to the quality of a sound
made by a particular voice or musical instrument;
timbre is useful in being distinct from pitch, intensity, and loudness as a descriptor of sound.
But because English is rarely simple about such things,
we have also these facts:
timber is listed as a variant spelling of timbre.
And timbre may also be correctly pronounced just like timber as \TIM-ber\.
And the spelling of timber was unsettled for many years;
it was sometimes spelled tymmer, tymber,and, yes, timbre.
The messy overlapping of these similar words is coincidental:
the consequence of the intersection of the different cultures
and languages that left their traces on English.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
'Timber'vs 'Timbre'
A handsome lumberjack explains the differencebetween these two words
English is full of coincidencesand collisions.
Words of disparate origin and different phonetics can overlap in surprising ways, sometimes changing to become similar to a more familiar form,
sometimes merging in ways that can be confusing.
"Some people confuse 'timbre' and 'timber',"
this lumberjack told our reporter.
"However, the words have different origins, different meanings, different spellings, and different pronunciations."
A case in point is the pair timber and timbre.
They have different origins, different meanings, different spellings, and different pronunciations—most of the time.
Let’s start with timber,which traces back to an Old English word
initially meaning “house” or “building”
and then came to mean
“building material,” “wood,” and “trees”or“woods.”
“Timbers” are large squared lengths of wood
used for building a houseor a boat.
As with many words for concrete objects,
metaphorical senses followedafter centuries of the word’s use:
the material used for houses became a word
meaning “material” or “stuff” in general (“it’s best-seller timber”)
and referring to the qualities of character, experience, or intellect (“managerial timber”).
In British English,
timber can be used as a synonym for lumber,
and it also has a specific legal meaningthat seems to
hearken to feudal times:
“trees (as oak, ash, elm over 20 years old)
that are part of a freehold and may not be cut by a life tenant.”
And, of course, there’s also the interjectional useof “timber!”
as a cry to warn of a falling tree;
the fact that most people know this
while few people have ever been able to deploy the word
in such a situation is almost certainly due to cartoons.
The fact that timbre comesfrom French influences its pronunciation:
it is often pronounced \TAM-ber\
and, with a more French-influenced second syllable, \TAM-bruh\.
It’s an unusual word in that it was borrowed at three different times
into English,
each time with a different meaning,
each time reflecting the evolution that the word had made in French.
Timbre initiallymeant a kind of drum,
and came to French from the Greek word tymbanon,
meaning “kettledrum”
—the same word that gave us timpani,
which came, like many musical terms, through Italian.
Timbre with this meaning has dropped from use in English
(it was dropped from our Unabridged Dictionary in 1961)
but lives on in the word timbrel,
which developed from the same root word.
In French, timbre became used for bells that were shaped like drums
and usually were fixed and struck with a hammer,
like the bellsof a carillon.
This “bell” use didn’t come into English,
but it evolved in meaning from metal semi-cylindrical bell
to metal helmet or crown used as the crest on a coat of arms,
and this meaning passed into English in the 1400s,
when coats of arms were all the rage.
This use on coats of arms led the French word
to its principal modern meaning, “stamp” and “postage stamp,”
since official crests were impressed or stampedon documents.
Finally, timbre came back a third time in the 1800s,
this time meaning “the quality of a sound made by a particular voice
or musical instrument,”
and is useful in being distinct from pitch, intensity, and loudness
as a descriptor of sound.
Now for the confusing bits:
timber is listed as a variant spelling of timbre.
And timbre may also be correctly pronounced just like timber
as \TIM-ber\.
And the spelling of timber was unsettled for many years;
it was sometimes spelled tymmer, tymber, and, yes, timbre.
The messy overlapping of these similar wordsis coincidental:
the consequence of the intersection of the different cultures and languages that left their traces on English.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Word History
The Strange Story of 'Lumber'
There's more to it than its raw materials
Our familiar sense of lumber,
meaning basically “sawn planks,”
was born in North America in the 17th century.
But that’s one of the few things we can
say with certaintyabout the word’s odd history.
In its older meanings, the word had been around in Britain
for many decades before it showed up in America:
as a verb, meaning chiefly “to move ponderously,”
and as a noun, meaning chiefly “surplus or disused articles that are stored away.”
This latter sense possesses a colorful history,
which begins in the region of northern Italy called Lombardy.
When a mans house is on fire, he does not so much looke to his lumber, and trash, and ordinary stuffe, but he labours to preserve his treasure and Iewels, his deeds and evidences.
— Thomas Adams, A Commentary, 1633
Having acquired an international reputation as bankers and lenders, native Lombards began arriving in England in the 14th century, establishing themselves particularly in the area of London that is still today its financial district, and near the street still known as Lombard Street.
Soon the term lombard was being used for lenders in general.
And because lending at its most basic level often involved pawning goods as security for loans, the Italians’ pawnshops came to be known as lombard-houses or lumber-houses, or simply lombards or lumbards.
Since pawnshops have historically had a sketchy reputation as repositories for fenced goods, lumber-house, or lumber, acquired the extended sense of a house where thieves store their stolen property.
Does thy Cozening Lawyer want a Memento Mori?
The Scrivener dried Parchment for thy Mortgages?
Thy Surgeon want a Skeleton? thy 'Pothecary a Mummy?
And thy Brother Belzebub a Broker's Shop?
Thy Lumber-house of Antiquity would furnish 'em all.
— Elkanah Settle, The World in the Moon, 1697
Pawnshops often incorporated warehouses for their larger objects, and thus the “stored articles” and “pawnshop” senses seem potentially related.
But any possible link between the noun and the verb—on the grounds that stored-away furniture tends to be bulky, and ponderous movement implies bulk and weight—is probably only indirect.
And any link between either of these and the common American noun sense seems attenuated as well.
In Britain, the word timber has long been used not only for standing trees suitable for construction but for sawn planks as well.
Only in North America—a continent of vast forests when the settlers arrived, at a time when Britain was already largely denuded of its woods—do we distinguish between timber and lumber.
No one could miss the aural and orthographic similarity of the two words, and indeed many Americans still confuse them.
Does this suggest that one may have influenced the other? Though there’s no real historical evidence, most of us perhaps implicitly assume so.
And is it possible that a term for “pawnshop” or “stored articles” in Britain could have expanded to include the sense “sawn planks” merely by crossing the pond?
Such a rapid and radical transformation—the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, and the word’s new signification is showing up in print by 1662—might seem improbable.
Did the novel abundance of a precious resource for construction indeed call forth an important new American meaning for an old British term?
Or should the American lumber instead be seen as a new word?
We'll keep moving ponderously (as lexicographers tend to do) in the direction of the truth.
Dictionary of Problem Words and Expressions
Timber & timbre
These “look-alikes” have different origins and meaning.
Timber, from Old English, means wood as a building material (lumber)
and wooded land:
“We collected enough timber to build a small shed.”
“That is a thriving stan of timber.”
Timbre, from a Greek word meaning “drum,”
refers to the quality of a sound that distinguishes it from
the other sounds of identical pitch and volume:
“This singer’s voice has unusual range and timbre.”
