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Brent asks, with respect to the word bachelor “What do an unmarried man and a four year college degree have in common; and which came first?”

They both appeared in the written record pretty darn close to each other in English.Someone who’d taken the lowest level of courses at an institution of learning is recorded as being called a bachelor as early as 1362.

Geoffrey Chaucer is the first person cited as calling an unmarried man a bachelor around 1386.

These dates point to a French entry point into English after William the Conqueror.

The earliest use of bachelor was recorded in 1297 according to The Oxford English Dictionary with a now largely forgotten meaning of a

• “a young knight, not old enough, or having too few vassals, to display his own banner, and who therefore followed the banner of another” or
• “a novice in arms.”

In both the case of bachelor “a four year college graduate” and bachelor “an unmarried man” it was this sense of youth that lent the word these new meanings.

The French roots of the word are usually presumed to have been from Latin but no one seems to have absolutely hammered down the exact etymology way back then.

There are quite a few suggested etymologies to bachelor but it isn’t uncommon to see several of them being suggested and subsequently shot-down on the same page. For instance the website Wordnik pulls from the American Heritage Dictionary to say “perhaps of Celtic origin” and then follows that up with an extract from The Century Dictionary saying “erroneously referred to a Celtic origin.”

One theory is that a Latin word baccalaria referred to a section of farm land and that the word bachelor came from a subordinate or tenant farmer on such land.

This land in turn might have been used for raising cows because the late Latin bacca had earlier been vacca meaning “cow.”

Another theory takes the Latin word baculum which means “stick” and suggests that the knights in training would practice using sticks instead of real swords.

Although the word bachelorette didn’t show up in English until 1935, one of the etymological theories was that in Old French there had been a word bachelle meaning “young woman” and that bachelor is simply the male equivalent of this.

Helen Rowland quipped that a bachelor thinks of himself as “a thing of beauty and a boy forever.”