fetch and fetch
Fetch has three distinct meanings, from two distinct roots:
a verb, probably from old English "foot": To go and come back, or to go and bring back. Specifically to go and come back roundabout.
a noun with three meanings, all derived from the verb sense, which is primary.
An act of fetching. A trick or stratagem (after the roundabout sense?). The length of open land or water over which wind or wave travels without obstacle (after the collision or conclusion sense, to fetch up?).
a noun of unknown but probably unrelated origin: An apparition of a loved one who is about to die or has just died, usually seen in a dream.
There is something haunting about the homonym with two different origins, and yet the meaning is strangely connected. (The ghost. To go and come back. Or to trick.) The fetch of the wind invokes the howling plains of the dead.
This is all for the class I'm teaching tomorrow, which turns out to have a lot of Name Magic in it. Hope to see locals at the library at 7:00? Everyone else, please consider the word "spell."
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Three meanings, so far as my tired brain can conjure:
Sit and rest a spell. (colloquial) She is casting spells and cantrips. Spell this word.
Time, magic and the assembling of letters.
Can you spell me? I need a break from this work. (unsure about that exact usage)
My favorite multiple-meaning word is “pan”, but only because I knew more meanings than the subject GRE, and thus had trouble finding the “correct” antonym.
The meaning “shift/substitute” has a different root from the rest of them. Originally “spela,” ME for “a shift of workers.” That sense still shows in usages like “to sit out a spell, To spell someone so they can rest, etc.” More broadly any this root gives the meaning “a period of time”: coughing spell, fainting spell, a bad spell of weather, etc.
But the magical sense of spell (which strictly means to control by invoking the name, or to draw or cast runes for power) and the common sense of spell (put the letters in order to make a word) are so closely related they might as well be identical. Both akin to the OE spell (or spel) to talk. A very old word of Germanic origin.
This excites me because it is as neat a capture as you could hope for for our basic instinct that words, especially written words, have a magic power.