You can live in a neighborhood. Part of life is childhood. You can utter a falsehood. You can wear a hood. You can open the hood of your car (or, if you’re driving a convertible in England, you can put the hood up or down). If your childhood goes badly in a bad neighborhood and you wear hoodies, people might think you’re a hoodlum.
All of those go back to just two words — both quite old — and one of them didn’t start out sounding much like “hood” at all. The kind of “hood” that you wear goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, where it was, as far as anybody knows, “kadh-,“ meaning to shelter or cover. It’s also the source of at least a couple of related words: “hat” and “heed.” It entered English first as “hood,” and over the centuries was used to mean a soft covering for your head, a metal helmet on a suit of armor, a leather cover for a bird’s head (especially when the bird was a falcon), and various varieties of hats. In the 1750s it meant a chimney. In the mid-1800s it meant a baby carriage. And of course when cars were introduced it was used for the engine cover (in the US) or the passenger cover (in the UK). By the way, “hood” in regard to cars originally meant the roof in the US as well, but by the 1920s it had shifted in the US to mean the cover over the engine. That shift never occurred in the UK.
“Hoodlum,” which basically means a juvenile delinquent, first appeared in San Francisco in the 1870s. It might or might not be related to the hood you wear; nobody is quite sure. There’s a reasonable possibility that it comes from a completely different word: “hodalum,” which is from a dialect of German. Since German-speakers were the largest language group (other than English-speakers) in San Francisco at the time, it’s at least plausible.
The “hood” that has to do with a state of existence (childhood) or a place (neighborhood) comes from the Old English suffix “-had.” It was also used as a separate word meaning a person, quality, or rank. “Cild-had” was “child-condition” and “papan had” was “papal dignity.” Some sources claim that the word might even be older, derived from the Indo-European “(s)kai-,” which meant “bright” or “shining,” and then became a Germanic word meaning quality or condition.
By the early 700s “had” was becoming “hood,” and over the next few centuries was combined with various other words to form “widowhood” in 897, “priesthood” in the 900s, “manhood” about 1225, “falsehood” in 1290, “neighborhood” in the late 1300s, and on to “likelihood,” “womanhood,” “boyhood,” “girlhood,” “adulthood,” and so on.
The suffix “-hood” is still being used to form new words — many of them have tended to be humorous, at least since “duckhood” appeared in the 1850s.
By the way, if you read sufficiently old books (you’d be surprised how interesting they can be), you might run into words like “childhead” and “falsehead” — the suffix “-head,” for a while, simply meant the same thing as “-hood” and was used interchangeably. In most cases “-hood” has outlasted “-head,” but there are a few compound words such as “godhead” that retained the other suffix. And with that we’ve arrived in the neighborhood of the end.
The title is a reference to the sinister secret identity of Sylvester Sneekly, the erstwhile guardian of Penelope Pitstop.
