digs

Somewhere along the way, a word for clawing into the earth turned into a word for a place to sleep. That is the little miracle hiding inside digs: first came dig, the rough, gritty verb for making a hole, and later the slang sense of ‘lodgings,’ as if a room were the place you’ve carved out for yourself in the world. English had other old words for digging—delve and grave—but dig turned out to be the one with the weirdest afterlife, picking up meanings like ‘study hard,’ ‘understand,’ and even ‘appreciate’ in 20th-century slang. The family resemblance with ditch and dike hints at a muddy, earth-moving ancestry, possibly from a Germanic form tied to a PIE root meaning ‘to stick, fix.’ So when someone says, ‘Nice digs,’ they’re using a word that once sounded more like a shovel than a sofa.