Remember, kids:  If it dies, it fries.

Dear Word Detective:  One of the favorite dishes in my native England is fish and chips (more likely to be called “fish and French fries” in your neck of the woods, as “chips,” I understand, are what we call “crisps”).  Nonetheless, there are many varieties of “chips” around these days, several of which are no doubt sitting in this computer as I write, doing the things chips do.  It occurred to me that “chip” was a rather strange word, but my dictionary was of little help.  Where did the word “chip” come from in the mists of eons past? — David, Ripon, England.

Interestingly, and somewhat bafflingly, your “fish and chips” are called “fish and chips” here in the US too.  I say “bafflingly” because if you were to ask for “chips” in a US restaurant, you would probably be handed a small bag of potato chips (or “crisps,” as you call them), not French fries.  It makes one wonder what Americans think the “chips” in “fish and chips” means.  “Giant chips of fish”?  “Crisps” as a name for potato chips is unknown over here, although an odd Frankenchip named Pringles (after a street in Cincinnati, Ohio) was forced to stop calling itself a “potato chip” back in the 1970s because it contains less than 42% potatoes.  Now Pringles, which comes in a can, calls itself a “crisp.”

Things, as William Butler Yeats once observed, fall apart, most often because someone has hit them with something, which brings us to the basic meaning of “chip.”  The history of the word is maddeningly vague and uncertain.  The earliest written instance of the noun “chip” found so far in English is in the early 14th century, but a much earlier existence in the form “cipp” is strongly implied by the Old English verb form “cippian” (to cut).  In any case, the earliest uses of “chip” as a noun were to mean a small piece of wood or stone created by breaking or cutting, as in wood chips.

Soon, of course, “chip” was being applied to small pieces taken from a larger hunk of just about anything.  The first known mention of “chips” in the sacred “fried slice of potato” sense can be laid at the door of none other than Charles Dickens, in his “A Tale of Two Cities” in 1859 (“Husky chips of potatoes, fried with some reluctant drops of oil”).  “Chip” was also used to mean the tokens of value (perhaps originally actual chips of wood) in games such as poker, soon  spawning a range of idioms such as “when the chips are down” (a moment of crisis or testing, as when all bets have been placed) and “to cash in one’s chips” (to quit or die).

“Chip” was also used to mean something derived from a larger thing or person, as in “chip off the old block,” and even came to mean the space or mark left by the loss of a chip of something, as in a “chip” in a table.

“Chip” in the sense of “computer processor” is probably the most recent distinct use of the word, dating back to the early 1960s when integrated circuits first came into use.  The tiny circuit boards must have reminded nearly everyone of “chips” of something, because the usage was almost immediately universally adopted (“The size of the wafers varies, but it is not uncommon for one about the size of a penny to carry several hundred tiny squares known as ‘chips,’ each containing anything from about 20 to perhaps 600 components,” 1967).  The latest verb form of “chip,” by the way, is “to chip” meaning the subcutaneous insertion of an electronic “chip” into an animal (or person) to aid in tracking and  identification.

Be right back! [Door slams; sound of car receding into distance.]

Dear Word Detective: I was recently reading a folk history, “Forgotten Towns of South Jersey,” in which the author refers to a 19th century preacher in his “long-tailed coat and dicer.” A coat I understand, but what is a “dicer?” An internet search turns up one reference, a turn-of-the-last-century newspaper feature about the discomfort of formal wear, again referring to the mysterious “coat and dicer.” Thinking about “dicer” made me realize how odd the whole “die-dice” group of words is. There is the verb “die,” to cease to live; the nouns “die,” the metal cutting tool (plural “dies”), and the gambling cube (plural “dice”(!)), the verb “dice,” to cut into cubes (which resemble dice). I hope you can define “dicer” and unravel the rest of the “die/dice” mess. O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to die-sieve (sorry, couldn’t stop myself). — Sam Glasscock.

Uh huh, OK, no problemo. Before we begin, however, I think I’ll warm up with something a bit simpler and less stressful, like giving our cats a bath. All at once. Seriously, that’s seventeen, maybe forty-six questions you have there, and this is the Three Items or Fewer aisle. So I’ll give it a shot, but don’t blame me if the ice cream ends up in the dog food bag.

Perhaps it’s best to begin at the end, so to speak. The verb “to die,” meaning to join the choir invisible, pine for the fjords, or just plain “croak,” appeared in the 12th century, probably borrowed from the Old Norse “deyja” (to die), which came from an ancient Germanic root, the same one that gave us “dead” and “death.” English had words for “die” before then, of course, but we adopted “die” when they were abandoned in favor of euphemisms (although those old “die” words live on in our modern “starve,” “swelter” and “quell”).

The “die” used in games of chance (plural “dice”) and the “die” meaning “metal block used to cut or stamp” (plural “dies”) are actually the same word, rooted in the Latin verb “dare,” meaning “to give,” but also “to play.” We adapted “die,” in the 14th century, from the Old French “de,” the plural of which was “dez,” which became our weird plural for the spotted cubes, “dice.” The verb “to dice,” to cut into small cubes, did indeed come, also in the 14th century, from this gambling sort of “dice.” The machine-shop sense of “die” arose later, in the 17th century, and took the more conventional English plural form “dies.” This “die” reflects the “give” sense of the Latin verb, as the die gives a shape to the material stamped or cut.

And now, the envelope please. A “dicer” is a man’s hat, made of stiff silk or felt, not as tall as a top hat, but of similar shape (though the term is sometimes also applied to a derby). “Dicers” were popular in the 19th century, and the term is still used as slang for any sort of hat with a brim, including baseball caps.

During the same period, “dicer” was also slang for a gambler specializing in games involving dice. It’s possible that “dicer” as the name for hat owes something to its popularity among gamblers, but several sources I found indicate that the name comes from the hat’s perceived similarity in shape to the sort of small felt-lined cup used to shake the dice in games of chance. It’s also possible that such a stiff, deep hat made an excellent “dice cup” in a pinch.