cover

This is one of those words that looks plain until you tug at the seams. Latin writers had cooperiō, literally a “complete covering,” and French kept sanding it down into covrir, the form that slipped into Middle English as coveren. That same family shows up in curfew, which was originally a “cover fire” bell in medieval France — a very practical order to bank the hearth and avoid burning down the town. It also haunts coverture, the old legal term for a married woman being “covered” by her husband’s authority, which is a much less cozy kind of blanket. So every time you say cover, you’re using a word that once meant not just hiding something, but putting a lid on trouble, fire, and even the law.