Getting to the Root of Another Word: Route

As I've described before, hiking in Alaska often involves navigating difficult terrain. One of the more challenging hikes was along a trail in the Tongass National Forest. The Tongass is a temperate rain forest in Southeast Alaska. The area where I went backpacking was in Juneau which receives an average of almost 8 feet of rain a year! This results in lots of mud to trek through. And, yes, it was raining for parts of my backpacking trip.

To make some trails a little more hiker-friendly, the park service has laid down wood planks along some of the swampier parts. Beware: while these do keep your shoes from getting soaked, the planks tend to be very slippery from moisture and moss.

In the areas which were void of planks, but full of mud, a different technique had to be employed. This is where the tree roots came in handy. By walking on the exposed roots, I was able to cross and traverse the mud holes.

Using roots as my route to follow brought me to thinking about the word route, especially since our northern brethren like to pronounce the word route like root. Just think of the Canucks and their butchering of the word about to something more like a boot. Getting back to my point, do the word for the sprawling underground plant organ and the word for path have some kind of connection? Did ancient man living in the prehistoric gardens of Eden also use large tree roots to better navigate the muddy forest floor?

Getting to the root of the roots of these words, I learned that the answer regarding both of these questions is most likely no. According to Merriam-Webster, the word root, which is older by one century, comes from Old Norse while route goes back to Latin. Though both words as we know them are from Middle English, it appears that root stems from an ancient word that looked more like rot, while route comes from the Latin rupta. So now the question is, whether or not it's a coincidence that these words with different origins wound up being pronounced almost the same. Maybe those Middle English folks who evolved the words into their modern forms were the ones who got tired of tromping around in the mud.