Well, it’s still a lot to me.

Dear Word Detective: My husband and I were watching TV, and the common word “grand” was used for “one thousand dollars.” Can you tell me the origin of this usage? I have found one place that says it started with bookies in the 1920’s, but that is all I can locate. — Annie Rowland, Marble Falls, Texas.

That’s an interesting question. Incidentally, has it ever struck anyone else as odd that the word “bookie” is reserved for people who facilitate illicit gambling (from keeping the “books,” or ledgers, of bets), and isn’t used for people who enjoy reading books, who have to travel under the awkward and vaguely creepy label “book lovers”? I may be a little sensitive on this subject, because many years ago I wrote a book called “The Book Lover’s Guide to the Internet,” and I can’t help but suspect that “The Bookie’s Guide…” would have sold better. (Yes, I know that makes no sense.)

By the way, that book is still for sale in many places. Please do not buy it. It was last updated in 1996, which, in internet terms, was approximately the 15th century.

Speaking of the 15th century, that’s when English adopted the Old French word “grant” (ultimately from the Latin “grandis,” great or large) as “grand,” with the sense of not simply “large,” but also “imposing” or “great, famous, exalted or important.” Over the next few centuries “grand” was frequently used in official titles (e.g., Grand Marshall), as well as in informal appellations honoring individuals (“grand old warrior,” etc.), and applied to events and things judged to be of great importance. Eventually, “grand” took on a more general sense in the popular vocabulary of “impressively large” (e.g., Grand Canyon) or “noble.” (The use of “grand” in “grandfather” and “grandmother,” however, is rooted in parallel terms in French, and actually predates the use of the “large” sort of “grand” in English by a century.)

Over the years, “grand” also acquired a variety of vernacular and slang senses, including “grand” meaning a large piano, as well as such forms as “grand prize” and “grand slam,” the latter once a term in whist or bridge, now used to mean “complete triumph” in any field.

The use of “grand” to mean “one thousand dollars” does indeed come from American underworld slang, first appearing around 1915. It was one of a number of slang terms, some still in use, for specific denominations of bills (or that amount of money), including “c-note” (or “century note”) for a one-hundred dollar bill (from the Roman numeral “C,” denoting 100). A “sawbuck” was a ten-dollar bill, from the resemblance of the Roman numeral “X” (ten) that once appeared thereon to a sawhorse, and a twenty-dollar bill was known as, logically, a “double sawbuck.”

The use of “grand” for a thousand dollars (or a thousand-dollar bill) may seem puzzling in this day of hedge-fund managers and their billion-dollar bonuses, but in 1915 one thousand dollars was a very large sum of money, far more than the average working stiff would ever possess at one time. So it made sense to pay tribute to such an impressive sum with the word “grand,” and the name stuck.

Tee many martoonies.

Dear Word Detective: How did the word “belt” come to mean taking a shot of alcohol? — Robert Schultz.

That is, as we say in the question-answering business, a darn good question. If I were a drinking man, I’d drink to that question. But I’m not, so I won’t, and neither should you. Also please refrain from using a cell phone and/or driving while reading this column. Contents may cause drowsiness, insomnia, hair loss, hair growth, unusual thoughts and possibly an odd burning smell. Tell your doctor if you notice a change in the length of your arms or legs, because doctors always know the best tailors.

For a small word, “belt” has spawned a remarkable number of uses, both literal and figurative, over the centuries since it first appeared in Old English. Ultimately rooted in the Latin “balteus,” meaning “sword belt” or “girdle,” in English “belt” at first was applied to any sort of leather strap around the waist, whether intended to hold up a weapon or simply the wearer’s pants. By the 14th century, a special use of belts to signify rank or athletic distinction had emerged, a sense still found in the “Black Belt,” etc., of the martial arts. Sports also gave us the phrase “to hit below the belt” (to fight unfairly), while “to tighten one’s belt” has meant “to cut back on expenditures” or “to endure hunger” since the 19th century. “Belt” has also been used for a wide variety of things resembling a belt, from the humble “conveyor belt” in a factory to an entire geographic swath of a country, as in “Bible Belt.”

“Belt” as a verb originally meant “to encircle with a belt,” especially as a symbol of honor or rank, or to mark off an area by stripping the bark off of trees. But the use of the common belt as a weapon, whether to punish children adults, soon made “belt” a synonym for “thrash or beat.” This led to “belt” meaning “to hit strongly” as well as the more genteel “belt” meaning “to sing or speak with great vigor” (“Bessie really belted out that song”). Somewhere between the “punch” and “sing” senses of “belt” emerged, in the mid-1800s, “belt” as a shortened form of “belt the bottle,” meaning “to drink liquor heavily” (“Jack takes to belting the old grape right freely to get his zing back,” Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls). This “belt” paralleled the use of “hit” in the same sense, as in “hit the sauce.”

This verb sense of “belt” meaning “to drink” then led, by the 1920s, to the use of “belt” as a noun meaning “a drink of liquor,” especially a quick, possibly furtive drink (Bob stepped behind the bleachers and took a quick belt from his flask”).