wallop

If you look up the word wallop in a dictionary, the definitions that come first may be surprising. They sure surprised me. Merriam-Webster defines it as an intransitive verb meaning “to boil noisily” or “to wallow, flounder” before getting to the transitive senses of “to thrash soundly” and “to beat by a wide margin,” and only then does it finally to the definition I think of when I hear this word: “to hit with force.

The sense of a wallop being a powerful hit comes first for its definitions as a noun, but it’s maybe most surprising to learn that none of these uses of the word directly correspond to its etymology. It entered English in the 1300s, meaning “to gallop,” and it may even come from a Frankish compound meaning “to run well,” which you can suss out if you think of the first syllable meaning “well” and the second “leap” or “lope.” Etymonline actually points out that the way wallop is used in English might have arisen entirely separately from the “gallop” sense and may even be imitative in origin.

What’s especially interesting about the wallop-gallop connection is it’s an example of a doublet — and specifically one resulting from English borrowing words more than once from the same language, in this case Norman French and then Old or Modern French, where the spot occupied by a “w” in the former becomes a “g” in the latter. In these examples, the two words are often not used exactly the same but are nonetheless still related:

ward and warden / guard and guardian

wardrobe / garderobe

warranty / guarantee 

wile / guile

wage / gage

wise / guise

reward / regard

You can also spot the connection in war and the French guerre, William and the French Guillaume.