The OED on Wrong (Wrong 4)

Delving into the history of a tricky word

The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of “wrong” occupies about five large-format pages covered with small print. It's about equally divided between the noun form (“Bob committed a great wrong”) and the adjectival or adverbial form (“you're doing it wrong” or “you're going the wrong way.”).

The mere fact of this word's odd spelling, beginning with a silent letter “w,” suggests that it has an old and interesting history. The OED definition confirms as much. The word found its way into English from Old Norse and related languages. Its most ancient root seems to be in a word describing something that is bent. It's a cousin of the word “awry,” meaning something that has gone astray. Another related word is “wring” meaning to twist something out of shape. Also related is “writhe.”

Other dictionaries tend to list the most commonly used definition first, but the OED is organized chronologically. It lists every definition that a word has ever had, beginning with the oldest. For each of these, it includes a quote from a document exemplifying this particular usage.

This feature makes it easy to see that this dichotomy in the meaning of “wrong” goes way back. People have been using it to mean a moral wrong since at least 1300, and a factual wrong since at least 1420. Though, when we reach that far back, the distinction between those two kinds of wrongness might become a bit hazy; separating moral from factual wrongs might be just a modern way of thinking.

What these two definitions of wrongness have in common is the notion of being twisted, or bent. In its oldest form, the word was applied in a literal sense to physical objects, such as a piece of wood. For example, one old source describes a shepherd's crook as being “wrong at the end.” Meaning not that something was wrong with it in the modern sense---as a shepherd's crook, it was perfect---but merely that it was bent. Another source describes someone as having a wrong nose; perhaps it had been broken, and not healed straight.

We can infer that from this older, more concrete sense of the word, people began to extend its usage in a metaphorical way to describe abstract states of affairs that had in some way lost their straightness, gone awry, become crooked. Sometimes that is a moral judgment and sometimes it has to do with facts and reasoning. This series of posts is mostly concerned with the latter kind of wrongness.

The ancient root of “wrong,” referring to something that is bent, is instructive because it helps frame wrongness as something that happens over the course of a thing's development, as opposed to being baked in from the very beginning. Like the shepherd's crook, an idea might run straight for most of its length and then go wrong at the end. Or like the nose, it might be straight and symmetrical until it gets broken in an accident or a fight.

For example, ancient people knew that malaria was associated with swamps--which was correct. They thought it was caused by bad air (the literal meaning of “malaria.”). That's where they went wrong--where they deviated from the correct course. They couldn't have imagined the complex life cycle of the organism that actually causes that disease, and so, even though they’d begun with a correct observation, their reasoning went awry and they came to a conclusion that was wrong.

Or, if we are following a mathematical proof, or an argument, we can sometimes point to a place where it has gone off the rails, and say “it's all fine up to this point, but here's where the author makes a mistake, and everything after that is wrong.”

This is a more generous and forgiving take on wrongness than merely saying that something is wrong from the outset--inherently wrong. It suggests we can identify where we have gone wrong, and make amends. It also jibes with Peirce’s philosophy of Fallibilism—specifically, his observation that people who follow what he calls the a priori method might begin with good intentions and solid facts but tend to go wrong eventually.

The OED definitions of “wrong,” sprawling across several pages, are an inadvertently hilarious tour of wrongness down through the centuries. People have been thinking about being wrong for a long time, it turns out. Every possible usage and variant of wrongness is painstakingly catalogued here, including many that are no longer in use. Going back to the most ancient meaning of the word, a “wrong” can denote a curved bough lopped from a tree and used for timber, e.g. as a rib or brace in a ship, where being bent is actually desirable. And indeed the very most ancient meaning of the word, from old Scandinavian languages, is the rib of a ship; it's related to “rung,” as in “rung of a ladder.” The Vikings who raided and conquered Britain came to those shores on ships literally made from wrongs, and brought the word into the language with them. These very early usages don't necessarily have a negative connotation. The eagle's beak is described as being wrong, because it's curved at the end. A beautiful passage from the 1400s says “The bowe is made of ii. [two] thynges, of a wronge tree, and a right strynge.”

As centuries go by, though, it comes to be used in the modern sense of something that is not as it should be. In medieval English we begin to see phrases that are in common use today such as “there's nothing wrong,” “I confess it was wrong of me,” “be it wrong or right,” “He has come to the wrong shop for that,” “the wrong foot,” “don't get me wrong,” and so on.

As a noun, “wrong” is used as early as 1200 to mean something that is unjust or unfair, and frequently used in opposition to “right.” To be in the wrong, or have wrong, is a parallel construction to French “avoir tort,” where “tort” is related to “tortuous,” “torsion,” and other words meaning twisted or wrung-with-a-w. So, “tort” and “wrong” are Latinate and Germanic equivalents, both related to twisting or bending; “tort” makes its way into modern English as a legal term, meaning a wrong or a cause for legal action, and “wrong” is the earthier and more commonplace way of saying the same thing. In other words, it's classic English: there's a base layer of Germanic words, which tend to be more earthy and direct, overlaid with a post-Norman-Conquest layer of Latinate words.

Right

Since “right” is commonly used as the counterpart of “wrong,” it seems obvious that this word is also worth looking up in the OED. Delving into this topic would more than double the length of this post, since its definitions cover nine pages.

It’s worth noting, though, that the OED breaks its coverage of “right” into two main sections. These are separate definitions of two words that are spelled identically, and that have been for over a thousand years.

The first “right” (two and a half pages) is a word referring to what is morally just, correct, consonant with truth and justice, as well as legal rights. The sense used in “right hand,” “right foot,” etc. is also thrown in here.

The second version of the word—again, spelled the same way—accounts for the remainder of those pages. Its primary definition is geometrical, meaning “Straight; not bent, curved, or crooked in any way.” So, this is the clear opposite of “wrong” in the geometrical sense applied to ships’ ribs, shepherd’s crooks and eagles’ beaks.

Poring over the etymology, which in both cases goes back to Old English texts from the tenth century, I can’t make out why the OED’s lexicographers decided to split these two definitions apart. The very earliest versions of both words are spelled the same way. But it’s clear from the texts provided that, over a thousand years ago, before the Norman Conquest, speakers of Old English were doing the same thing we do today: using the same word to denote rightness in the legal/moral sense, and rightness in the geometric sense.

This explains why “right” is sometimes used in technical contexts that have nothing to do with moral or legal rightness—or, for that matter, with “right” versus “left.” I’m thinking of the term “right angle” which simply means something that stands straight up, and the astronomical term “right ascension” which I could never make sense of until I understood it as proceeding from a different version of the word “right” — one rooted in geometry and having no connection to “left.” Likewise “righting the ship,” “to set something aright,” and other usages can be traced back to this geometric meaning.

A teaser for the next installment…

One of the OED’s definitions of “wrong” sent me down a pretty deep rabbit hole in Sixteenth Century English history, which I intend to explore in a future post. Or possibly a series of them, since the current draft of that future post is already getting a little long. In order to clear the decks for that, I’ve written this post to set out the lexicographical context. It might take me a few weeks to pull the next bit together! In the meantime I might take a break from Wrong-related posts and touch on some other topics.