This is Origins in Five. Five minutes one word, a small story to start the day. Today's word is eavesdrop. Eavesdrop means to secretly listen to someone's conversation, but when we deconstruct the word, it does not appear to have anything to do with listening to someone. Eavesdrop is made of two distinct words eve and drop. Eve refers to a part of the roof that overhangs a house. For those that like visuals, picture an old cottage with a slanted roof extending slightly beyond the walls. That overhanging edge is called the eve. And drop, of course, means just that, a drop or fall. But what does something dropping from a roof have to do with secretly listening to someone else's conversation? As it turns out, quite a lot. Now, most houses today have gutters that capture the water and direct it down to the ground without letting it drip off the roof. But in the medieval days, the eaves were used instead of gutters. Rain water would drop from the eaves onto the ground below. So at first the water that dropped to the ground below was known as eavesdrop. Then, over time the word slightly changed, meaning and its meaning began to refer to the place where the water actually fell. That is the line of wetness that formed from the water dropping from the roof was known as the eavesdrop. At first the word had nothing to do with spying or gossip. It was just a physical location around a house that was usually muddy and wet. But the narrow piece of property between the eavesdrop line and the house tended to be dry as the water would not fall in that area. As you can imagine, especially in medieval England, houses were small, crowded, and not especially private. Windows were often open, walls were thin, and conversations could easily be overheard from outside. And if someone happened to stand at this dry area between the eavesdrop line and the house during bad weather, they could stay relatively dry while lingering close enough to listen in. And that's what started to happen. And people began to notice that some individuals spent a little too much time standing near other people's homes. By the 1500s and 1600s, the word eavesdropper started appearing in English legal records. And this was not considered harmless behavior. An eavesdropper was someone who secretly listened to private conversations and then usually spread gossip or rumors afterward. In some communities, eavesdropping was treated as a public nuisance. Courts occasionally punished people accused of lurking near windows or doors trying to overhear conversations. Over time, the word evolved from meaning the location of where the water fell to the act of listening to others' conversations while standing in a dry spot. Now today when we hear the word eavesdrop, we usually think of someone listening behind a door or a wall or an FBI agent spying on a phone call. Most people have forgot the original roofing connection entirely. And that's Origins in Five. One word, one story to start your day.