It seems strange, when we come to think of it, that great English sailors like Admiral Jellicoe and Admiral Beatty are called by a title which is really the same as the name of an Arabian chieftain—Emir. Admiral comes from the Arab phrase amir al bahr, "emir on the sea."
Just the opposite to doublets which do not resemble each other are many pairs of words which are pronounced alike and sometimes spelled alike. Very often these words come from two different languages, and there are many of them in English through the habit the language has always had of borrowing freely whenever the need of a new word has been felt.
The word weed, "a wild plant," comes from an Old English word, weod; while "widows' weeds" take their name from the Old English word wœde, "garment." The word vice, meaning the opposite of virtue, comes through the French from the Latin vitium, "a fault;" while a "vice," the instrument for taking a perfectly tight hold on anything, comes from the Latin vitis, "a vine," through the French vis, "a screw." Yet another vice, as in viceroy, vice-president, etc., comes from the Latin vice, "in the place of." Angle, meaning the sport of fishermen, comes from an Old English word, angel, "fish-hook;" while angle, "a corner," comes from the Latin word angulus, which had the same meaning.
We might imagine that the word temple, as the name of a part of the head, was a metaphor describing the head as the temple of the mind, but it has no such romantic meaning. Temple, the name of a place of worship, comes from the Latin templum, "a temple;" but temple, the name of a part of the head, is from the Latin word tempus, which had the same meaning in Latin, and also the earlier meaning of "the fitting time." It has been suggested that in Latin tempus came to mean "the temple," because it is "the fitting place" for a fatal blow, the temple being the most delicate part of the head.
Tattoo, meaning a "drum beat," comes from the Dutch tap-toe, "tap-to," an order for drinking-houses to shut. But tattoo, describing the cutting away of the skin and dyeing of the flesh so common among sailors, is a word borrowed from the South Sea Islanders.
Sound meaning "a noise," and sound meaning "to find out the depth of," as in sounding-rod, are two quite different words. The one comes from the word son, found both in Old English and French, and the other from the Old English words sundgyrd, sund line, "a sounding line;" while sound meaning "healthy" or "uninjured," as in the expression "safe and sound," comes from the Old English word sund, and perhaps from the Latin sanus, "healthy."
The existence of so many pairs of words of this sort, which have the same sound and which yet come from such different origins—origins as far apart as the speech of the people of Holland and that of the South Sea Islanders, as we saw in the word tattoo—illustrates in a very interesting way the wonderful history of the English language.