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Dear Word Detective: My question is about a phrase I heard while growing up in Kansas. After dinner, my Mom would say, “it’s time to rid up the dishes.” Where did this expression come from? — Candy.

Ah yes, doing the dishes. I learned something recently about doing the dishes. Last month [referring to Oct. 2008] Hurricane Ike knocked out our power for the better part of a week, which meant that we had no lights, TV, etc. More importantly, it meant, because we have a well, that we had no water. Naturally, the night before we lost power, we had decided to let the dinner dishes slide. Big mistake. After the second day of the outage, I began to dream about being able to wash dishes.

“Rid up” in the sense that your mother used it, “to tidy up or clear a room, to clean,” is not uncommon in the American Midwest, although it certainly isn’t as popular as it once was. But while “rid” in this sense is now considered a dialectical usage restricted largely to the rural US, it was once standard English and in common use way back in 16th century England (”Take off, boy, rid the table, and bring those fritters,” 1599).

The use of “rid” to mean “clean up” is a specialized sense of the same verb “to rid” we use to mean “to make a person or place free of something annoying, troublesome or dangerous” (”If you put the laws in execution, …you would soon rid the country of these vermin,” Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749). Probably the most common use of “rid” today is in the verbal phrase “to get rid of,” as in “If only Janet would get rid of that doofus Tony, she might meet a nice guy for a change.”

The roots of “rid” lie in Old Norse, but very early in the word’s history in English it became entangled with another word, “redd,” which is a Scots and northern English dialect word also meaning “to clean, tidy up.” Like “rid,” “redd” arrived in the US via immigrants from Great Britain, but “redd” now tends to be heard primarily in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Over time the parallel usage of “rid” and “redd” to both mean “clear out” or “clean up” has led to the two words nearly merging in their definitions, although “rid” in the more general sense of “make something go away” is far more common than “redd.”

As if all that isn’t complicated enough, there are actually two “redds” lurking out there, one derived from a Middle English root meaning “to clear an area” and the other from a different root meaning “to free or rescue.” But in practical usage the meanings of the two overlap so much that they might as well be considered the same word.