A Good Old Word: Husband

If you are married and if you are a man, then you are a husband.  But that was not always so in the English language.  Until the 13th century, a male spouse was called a wer.  So a married couple was wer and wif.  Using wer as a designation of maleness has been retained, as far as I know, only in the word werewolf.But by the 13th century, the word husband was used to describe a married man.

Husband is a combination of two words, hus, meaning house, and bondi, meaning dweller.  So we have “house dweller.”  But early on husband also meant “master of a household,” in other words, someone of sufficient means to own his house.

There is another meaning for husband as well, perhaps several.  We still speak of animal husbandry, and my dictionary defines husbandry as “the careful management of domestic resources.”  Is this meaning of husband related to the male spouse who is a house dweller?  It is, and the connection is really quite clear.  If one dwells in a place, then he takes care of or manages that place.  If he does this well, he is a good husband.  Eventually husband came to mean not just caretaker but “one who manages well, carefully, frugally.”  Husbandry is good management.  The English poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith has this to say about Dutch people, pleasure, and husbandry:  "The Dutch frugally husband out their pleasure."  He may be right.  Perhaps all of us have to do husband our pleasure in this time of COVID 19 quarantine.

If one managed a place in the 13th century, it quite likely was a farm or a manor.  The management of rural places involved animals and land; thus Roger Ascham says in 1545, "A good ground, well-husbanded, bringeth forth great plenty of big-eared corn." 

Animal husbandry is the careful nurture and care of animals.  A Scottish paper says that the chief branch of husbandry is the rearing of sheep.  Husband meaning animal care and husband meaning male spouse come together in a rather strange way in the 17th century when the male of a pair of animals is called a husband.  The bull is the husband of a cow.  And the poet John Dryden says "the bull is the husband of the herd."

William Coverdale’s translation (1535) of II Chronicles 26:10 reads, “He [Uzziah] delighteth in husbandry.”  The NIV says, “He loved the soil.” Thomas Traherne (1675) moves from literal soil husbandry to spiritual husbandry when he writes: “The heart prepared to receive it [the word] by the husbandry of providence.”

So what do we have?  Husband meaning male spouse.  That still works today.  Husbandry as careful and frugal management.  That works but is rarely used.  Animal husbandry as the care and nurture of animals.  I suppose that works today though to call a hog confinement with 2,000 hogs “animal husbandry” would be a misuse of the word. My father-in-law, an old, retired farmer, would have called it a misuse of animals as well.