If you’re an actor in a play, you probably do a lot of rehearsing. There might even be a funeral scene in the play you’re rehearsing, and one of the sets might include a hearse. If you’re rehearsing with a hearse, you’re working with two words that seem like they’d be completely different, but are actually closely related.
Both “hearse” and “rehearse” come from the same Latin word, “hirpex”, which is, of all things, a rake. “Hirpex” made its way into Old French as “herse,” and while it still meant a rake, it also was used to mean one of those metal stands that holds a whole line of candles in a church. It looks kind of like a rake, right?
Those metal candle holders are used for any number of ceremonies in churches, but in particular they were— and still are — placed near a coffin during a funeral. For some reason (and here the transfer of meaning gets a little foggy), “herse” began to be used for the carriage that carries the coffin both to and from the church. The word entered English around the 1300s as “hearse,” and the transfer of meaning from the candle stand to the carriage happened only around 350 years later. The new meaning of “hearse” as a carriage or wagon didn’t eliminate the original meaning, though; as recently as the 1800s “hearse” still meant a framework for holding candles. Instead of the original metal stand, though, by the 19th century it had become a wooden construction: “It was the custom in the case of rich families to erect one of these hearses in every church where it [the body] rested for the night.” That’s from “Church Gleanings”, in 1896. And from the same era, we have “A hearse..stopped before our door,” from “The Chaplain of the Fleet” by Walter Besant and James Rice in 1881. (By the way, “The Chaplain of the Fleet,” if you can find a copy, probably has a lot more quotes to offer; it’s three volumes long).
Along the way “hearse” acquired a number of other meanings. Most of them are related in some way to funerals, from the “hearse” that’s a tomb to the “hearse” that’s a cloth used to cover the coffin. But one outlier is the “hearse” that was a specially made wagon used in London in the early 1800s. Well-to-do Londoners were pleased to purchase “grand pianofortes” at the time (we just call them pianos), and the builders delivered them in “hearses” designed for nothing other than carrying the instrument.
Now on to “rehearse,” which is something you do to practice a play, and also a wedding, but generally there aren’t any rehearsals of funerals. If you think about it, this might be a little bit odd; a big funeral can be just as elaborate a ritual as a wedding, but you only get one chance to get it right. Do or die, I guess. But recall that “hearse” comes from the Old French “herse,” which came from the Latin “hirpex,” which meant “rake.”
“Rake” is used as a noun and a verb. The process of raking, which is really a process of repetitively raking over and over again, was “rehercer” in Old French, and in the 1300s English included the word “rehearse,” meaning to say over and over again.” It wasn’t originally limited to practicing a performance; it was used, as by Chaucer in the “Squire’s Tale” (1395), to mean simply “saying again:” “What nedeth yow rehercen hir array?”
“Rehearse” was also used to mean simply relating a story or report: “I could rehearse of trades, a number more Which but for Hempseed quickly would grow poore,” (John Taylor, “In Praise of Hemp-Seed,” 1620). Until about the 1700s, “rehearse” — which started out meaning “to say repeatedly” — was used to mean simply “say,” whether once or more often: “Yf you haue any more to saye: reherse it; and I woll answere you.” That’s from 1550. But more recently, “rehearse” once again means saying (and doing) repeatedly, even if the repetitions aren’t all at the same time.
The sense of “rehearse” being for a performance comes from the usage that arose around the late 1600s and meant “reciting for an audience:” “All Rome is pleas’d, when Statius will Reherse, And longing Crowds expect the promis’d Verse” (from “The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis…” — the title goes on for another two sentences — translated by John Dryden in 1693).
Now that you’re acquainted with the unexpected relationship between “hearse” and “rehearse,” and you’ve seen some of the quaint old uses of those words, you can…but wait a minute, what’s that right there? “Acquaint?” “Quaint?” Hmmm, I wonder if those two are related too?
