fond

The modern adjective fond refers to the quality of having affection, liking, or eagerness for someone or something. But this was not always so. In Middle English fonned could mean foolish or stupid. The verb fonnen meant to be foolish or misguided or to fool or make a fool of someone, and the modern fond comes from the past participle of that verb, fonned. The word fun comes from the same root, and in early use could mean a fraud or deception or, as a verb, to cheat. And the modern verb to fondle is derived from the verb fonnen, appearing in the sixteenth century.

We don’t know where fond comes from; it just appears in Middle English. There are what look to be cognates in Swedish and Icelandic, which might point to the word having been brought to England by the Vikings, but there are phonological problems with that hypothesis that make it unlikely.

In Middle English, fond could also be a noun, meaning “fool,” as in Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale, written c. 1390:

Why ne had thow pit the capul in the lathe?
Ilhayl! By God, Alayn, thou is a fonne!

(Why did you not put the horse in the barn?
Ill fortune! By God, Alan, you are a fond!)

But over time, the word softened, coming to mean gently foolish, as in a person overcome with the madness of love. In 1578, John Lyly writes in his Euphues:

If Phillis were now to take counsayle, shee would not be so foolish to hang hir selfe, neyther Dido so fonde to dye for Aeneas, neyther Pasiphae so monstrous to loue a Bull, nor Phedra so vnnaturall to be enamoured of hir sonne.

And by 1590, Shakespeare was using fond in its modern sense, where the foolish connotation has been dropped, leaving only the gently loving. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.1), Oberon tells Puck:

A sweet Athenian Lady is in loue
With a disdainefull youth: annoint his eyes,
But doe it when the next thing he espies,
May be the Lady. Thou shalt know the man,
By the Athenian garments he hath on,
Effect it with some care, that he may proue
More fond on her then she vpon her loue.

But the older sense of foolish did not completely disappear for some while. Thirteen years later the Bard has this exchange in Measure for Measure (2.2)

Isab[ella]. Hark, how Ile bribe you: good my Lord turn back.

Ang[elo]. How? bribe me?

Is. I, with such gifts the heauen shall share with you.

Luc[io]. You had mar’d all else.

Isab. Not with fond Sickles [foolish shekels] of the tested gold,
Or Stones, whose rate are either rich, or poore
As fancie values them: but with true prayers.

So when you say you are fond of words and language, there may be double entendre buried in there.

Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Reeve’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 1:4088–89. Harvard Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Liberman, Anatoly, Word Origins ... And How We Know Them, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 91, 195.

Lyly, John. Euphues. The Anatomy of Wyt. London: Gabriell Cawood, 1578, 39. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. fonnen, v., fonne, n., fonned, ppl. & adj.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, December 2020, s.v. fond, adj. (& adv.) & n.1, fon, v., fon, n.1 & adj.1, fondle, v.; September 2017, fun, n. & adj., fun, v.

Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 2.2, 68. STC 22273 Fo.1 no.68. Folger Shakespeare Library.

———. A Midsommer Nights Dreame. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 2.1, 150. STC 22273 Fo.1 no.68. Folger Shakespeare Library.

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