Maybe you’re in a quiet train car and someone is talking loudly on their phone, or you’re around the corner from colleagues chatting in the break room and they don’t know you’re there. However you end up in that situation, sometimes the juicy details of another person’s private conversation are too tantalizing to resist, and now you’re an eavesdropper. “Eavesdropping” is a catch-all word that refers to any sort of aural snooping, but it wasn’t always that way. Early eavesdropping took place in a very specific location, from which the term got its name.
The word “eavesdrop” comes from “eavesdrip,” which was coined in an Old English charter from 868 CE, though it had little to do with snooping and more to do with architectural features of a house. “Eavesdrip” referred to the area around a house where rain fell off the edge of the roof (extensions known as “eaves”) and onto the ground.
Sometime before the 1500s, the architectural term evolved into “eavesdrop,” and it also acquired its modern connotation of snooping. If someone was an eavesdropper, they were known to stand in close vicinity around a house so they could secretly listen in on the private conversations happening inside. In 1515, one text warned citizens about “Euesdroppers vnder mennes walles or wyndowes… to bare tales.” Another citation from 1611 reads, “To eaue-drop, to prie into men’s actions or courses.” Despite the variations in spelling, you can see “eavesdroppers” had much the same reputation back then as they do now.
In time, “eavesdrop” shed its very literal definition. Someone no longer has to literally stand beneath an eave in order to eavesdrop — neighborhood busybodies are just as comfortable picking up gossip on their front porch or on the phone as they’re standing under the eaves.
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