What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of “lords” and “ladies”? Images of old-world aristocracy and wealth? Perhaps characters from a nineteenth-century British novel? Or maybe you think of the “nine ladies dancing” and “twelve lords a-leaping” from the Christmas song?
It might surprise you to know that these aren’t the things that spring to mind when a philologist—someone who studies the origins and histories of language—hears those words. When philologists hear “lord” and “lady,” the first thing they’re likely to think of is bread.
You wouldn’t expect the origins of these two words to have anything to do with bread, but that’s exactly the case: “lord” and “lady” were originally domestic terms referring to the making and keeping of bread.
Both “lord” and “lady” come from Old English, the oldest recorded form of English, in use from roughly 500-1000 A.D. “Lady” in Old English had the form hlæfdiġe (the ġ in Old English was pronounced like the y in Modern English words). “Lord” in Old English was hlafweard. Both hlæfdiġe and hlafweard originally had much humbler designations than today: they referred simply to the female and male heads of a household.
But where does the bread come in? Well, the word for “bread” in Old English was hlaf—this word survives today as “loaf.” So hlaf was “bread,” and hlæf-diġe, the term for a lady, a female head of house, meant literally “one who kneads bread.” (The -diġe part, meaning “to knead,” is related to Modern English dough.)
So “lady”—hlæf-diġe—originally meant “bread-kneader.” As for “lord,” the male head of house, that was originally hlaf-weard, meaning “the one who guards or keeps the bread.” The -weard part is Modern English ward, as in “to ward off” or “guard against.” (The word guard itself is what happened when French got ahold of the word ward, only for it to be Frenchified and brought back into English; but that’s a story for another day.)
Rather than having aristocratic designations, “lord” and “lady” were originally descriptive domestic epithets: the hlafweard was the one who guarded and preserved the bread; the hlæfdiġe was the one who kneaded and baked the bread.
Now for a final, burning question: when I was studying historical linguistics in college, my professor discussing these words referred to them—with maybe a slight twinkle in his eye—as important indicators of “gender roles.” My classmate and I were divided: was he making a pun on “rolls,” or was that just a coincidence? (I think there really was that twinkle in his eye when he said it.)