The idea of this essay occurred to me when I was screening all kinds of sources for my bibliography of English etymology (see Liberman 2010; by now it has grown quite considerably). Many valuable articles on word origins have appeared in the course of two centuries and a half in the transactions of various learned societies. They are hard to find, for such volumes may contain works on unrelated subjects, with etymology seldom being prominent in them. Two years ago, I discovered a paper by Albert Matthews, a distinguished student of American English, on the combination hired man and its synonyms (Matthews 1898). The paper referred to a letter exchange in The Nation. In the nineteenth century and later, this periodical accepted materials of linguistic interest with some regularity.

The initiator of the exchange was F[itzedward] H[all] (1896a), an authority on the history of English and English usage. His letter on the terms hired man (woman, girl), servant, and help elicited two responses that won't concern us, but in his second letter (Hall 1896b) he suggested that the phrase hired man had in the past been pronounced with a unifying stress (´hired man) and that it goes back to OE1 hīrēd man. Hīrēd meant ‘retinue, troop’, and hīrēd man signified ‘retainer’.

Hall's etymology struck me as indefensible, but it turned out that he was not even the first to offer it. Skeat suggested, though tentatively, the same derivation in 1882; yet he gave it up almost at once. After Skeat and Hall, Kaufmann (1910: 27, note 1) defended this idea. None of them knew that Minsheu (1617) had already made the connection between hire and hīrēd. Those who wrote etymological dictionaries after him and were in the habit of discussing the views of their predecessors did not cite Minsheu, and his conjecture fell by the wayside.

Evidently, hīrēd was a well-known word, for it made its way into Old Icelandic (hird) with the same meaning as in Old English. Its Old High German cognate was hirat, extant in the modern language as Heirat ‘marriage’ (< ‘household’, the noun's original sense). OE -rēd and OHG -rāt are allied, while hī- has been traced to *heiwa-‘family’, as in Go. heiwa-frauja ‘master of a house’.