What could possibly be interesting about the word here? Here is the opposite of there; “it’s neither here nor there”, “Here’s to a wonderful evening and great friends”. This little word turns up all over the place in the English language; but what if I told you here in this word-of-the-day entry has an entirely different meaning?
The word here means army and shares a connection with the word harbour.
If you travelled back in time to the ninth century, the people of England spoke Old English or Anglo-Saxon. If you could visit England during this era, the language would be almost incomprehensible and certainly no one would understand you, neither your words nor your funny accent. But with a bit of research into Old English, the origins of many of our modern words become clear.
For the Anglo-Saxons, the word here meant army or, in a more general sense, a company or host. In the ninth century, the word appears in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and it refers to the ‘host’ of the Danish invaders: Þy ilcan geare gefeaht Æþelhelm dux wiþ Deniscne here (honestly, it does; although this sentence means nothing to the modern English speaker).
This explains how the UK city of Hereford got its name: here- means army and -ford means a river-crossing. In this city, the armies of the day crossed over the River Wye.
Moving on to the word harbour.
In Old English this was herebeorg. The her- underwent a phonetic change to become har- and a beorg was a shelter, which also underwent phonetic change to become -bour. A harbour, then, was a place for an army to shelter and this is why here has a connection with harbour.
