[15] [‘Assagai’ is from the Arabic az- (al-) zaghāyah, ‘the zagāyah’, a Berber name for a lance (N.E.D.).]
[16] [This puts the cart before the horse. ‘Fetish’ is really the Portuguese word feitiço, artificial, made-up, factitious (Latin factitius), applied to African amulets or idols.]
[17] [‘Domino’ is Spanish rather than Italian (Skeat, Principles, ii, 312).]
[18] [‘Harlequin’ appears to be an older word in French than in Italian (ibid.).]
[19] On the question whether this ought to have been included among the Arabic, see Diez, Wörterbuch d. Roman. Sprachen, p. 10.
[20] Not in our dictionaries; but a kind of coasting vessel well known to seafaring men, the Spanish ‘urca’; thus in Oldys’ Life of Raleigh: “Their galleons, galleasses, gallies, urcas, and zabras were miserably shattered”.
[21] [A valuable list of such doublets is given by Prof. Skeat in his large Etymological Dictionary, p. 772 seq.]
[22] This particular instance of double adoption, of ‘dimorphism’ as Latham calls it, ‘dittology’ as Heyse, recurs in Italian, ‘bestemmiare’ and ‘biasimare’; and in Spanish, ‘blasfemar’ and ‘lastimar’.
[23] [‘Doit’, a small coin (Dutch duit) has no relation to, ‘digit’. Was the author thinking of old French doit, a finger, from Latin digitus?]
[24] Somewhat different from this, yet itself also curious, is the passing of an Anglo-Saxon word in two different forms into English, and continuing in both; thus ‘desk’ and ‘dish’, both the Anglo-Saxon ‘disc’ discus, Greek diskos] the German ‘tisch’; ‘beech’ and ‘book’, both the Anglo-Saxon ‘boc’, our first books being beechen tablets (see Grimm, Wörterbuch, s. vv. ‘Buch’, ‘Buche’); ‘girdle’ and ‘kirtle’; both of them corresponding to the German ‘gürtel’; already in Anglo-Saxon a double spelling, ‘gyrdel’, ‘cyrtel’, had prepared for the double words; so too ‘haunch’ and ‘hinge’; ‘lady’ and ‘lofty’ [these last three instances are not doublets at all, being quite unrelated; see Skeat, s. vv.]; ‘shirt’, and ‘skirt’; ‘black’ and ‘bleak’; ‘pond’ and ‘pound’; ‘deck’ and ‘thatch’; ‘deal’ and ‘dole’; ‘weald’ and ‘wood’†; ‘dew’ and ‘thaw’†; ‘wayward’ and ‘awkward’†; ‘dune’ and ‘down’; ‘hood’ and ‘hat’†; ‘ghost’ and ‘gust’†; ‘evil’ and ‘ill’†; ‘mouth’ and ‘moth’†; ‘hedge’ and ‘hay’.