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'Angus' and the Valkyries. What's the Linguistic Connection?

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Edited by Richard Walker, Monday 9 February 2026 at 14:02

'Angus' and 'Valkyrie' both contain elements derived from the same root as the modern English choose.

Valkyries are female figures in Norse Mythology who hover over battlefields and gather up the souls the slain. carrying them to Valhalla, where they will spend their time alternately feasting and preparing themselves to fight in the last battle, Ragnarök, at which the gods will be defeated and the cosmic order overturned.

Valkyrie literally means 'slain chooser'. The first element valr is an Old Norse word referring to those slain in battle, and the second from Old Norse kyrja, 'chooser', which derives from a PIE root *gues-, whose meaning was 'choose' or 'taste'. It has a host of cognates in different languages, such as Spanish gusto, French goût, English disgust and choose, and Old Irish gus, 'strength', 'excellence', 'choice'.

And that brings us to Angus. The first element here is an-, from the same PIE root as English an, a, one. And you have probably already spotted the second element is gus, 'choice'.  So Angus is 'one choice' or 'one excellence'.

It's interesting, and something I didn't know, that the word valkyrie survived into middle English but with meaning of 'sorceress'; the Middle English Compendium records the phrase "Wychez and walkyries' from around 1400.

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Richard Walker

Words of the Day — Twain and Thrin

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Edited by Richard Walker, Sunday 1 February 2026 at 21:17

If you love words and love numbers then unusual number words are the tops!

Today's both have interesting histories.

Twain

Mark Twain famously took 'Mark Twain' as his pen name, after hearing it used on Mississippi steamboats to mean a water depth of two fathoms (measured by the second mark on a plumbline).

There is an archaic ring to 'twain', and it is a fossil word, now mainly used in formulaic phrases like 'cleave in twain' and rare, at 0.3 occurrences per million words.

Originally it just meant 'two', but not just two of any old thing, it was two things with masculine grammatical gender. In Old English nouns were masculine, feminine or neuter, as in modern German. Two (and three) were adjectives and had to agree with the thing they were describing, so we had twegen (M), twa (F) and tu (N). (It's actually a bit more complicated, because they also had to agree as to grammatical case, but you get the idea.)

Here are examples, courtesy of AI Overview

  • Twegen cnitas
  • Twa cwena
  • Tu scipu

(A knight was originally a boy (like modern German Knabe) but later changed its meaning.)

The masculine twegen survived as twain, but with a slightly different meaning, and the other forms became modern two. Its survival may have beed aided by its use in the King James' Bible, which intentionally used archaic language.

Thrin

This is a much rarer word at 0.01 occurrences per million words. It is to three what twin is to two, and means something like 'threefold' or it can actually mean one of three children. Although it's from the same Germanic root as three, and ultimately from the same PIE root, it came into English not directly, but via Old Norse þrinnr, 'threefold'.
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