Pylimitics

If a sailor pulled up his anchor only to discover that one of the flukes had snagged a big fluke, they would probably dismiss it as just a fluke. But the real fluke would, of course, be that the sailor had inadvertently encountered all three English words that are “fluke” in the course of a single sentence!

The “fluke” that’s a fish (more precisely a flatfish like a flounder) comes from the Old Norse word “floke,” which was what they called that same kind of fish. It comes from the Germanic source meaning flat, which is also the source of the English word ‘flat.” 

The “fluke” of an anchor is the triangular thing at the end of the prong (at least if you’re visualizing an old-time sailing ship anchor). This word appeared in the 1500s, and nobody really knows where it came from. It might be related to the fish because that part of the anchor is flat like the fish. While you might point out that the triangular parts of a whale’s tail are also called “flukes,” and maybe the thing on the anchor was named for those, you’d be making that guess because you didn’t know the real story. The whale’s tail was named for the anchor instead.

There’s also the “fluke” that’s a one-time chance occurrence; an accident. Nobody is quite sure what the origin of that is either, but it appeared in the 1800s and at first meant a lucky shot in billiards. The best theory traces it back to the word “fluke” meaning a guess in some very old English dialects. It’s probably either that, or just a fluke. 

“Billiards,” by the way, has been around since the late 1500s (I’m talking about the word, but that probably goes for the game as well). If the word sounds vaguely French, that’s because it is; “billiard” was originally a French word for a small stick. It was a diminutive of the Latin “billia,” which meant tree trunk. Strictly speaking, each cue stick in the game is a “billiard” — but then, each lucky shot is a “fluke”, strictly speaking. And speech, unlike some games of billiards, is not customarily all that strict.