In a Word: How to Laminate an Egg

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

The title of this column might seem a little odd … and it should. An egg isn’t something one normally thinks of laminating, though, from a certain angle, it happens all the time.

The verb laminate “to beat or roll into thin plates” traces back to the Latin lamina “thin plate, leaf, or layer.” To laminate and lamination were well-established in English by the end of the 17th century, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that manufacturers began producing thin plastic coverings and calling them laminates, as a noun.

From the same root, Latin-speaking Romans referred to small metal plates using the diminutive form lamella. Over the course of centuries, lamella underwent a series of small alterations to become a common breakfast item. It went like this:

In Old French, lamella became lemelle. La lemelle was the blade of a sword or knife, but as time passed, the word was misinterpreted as l’alemelle; the l’ was thought to be the French word for “the,” turning lemelle into alemelle. Linguists call this type of misinterpretation metanalysis, and it was also an element in the evolution of the words ingot, newt, nickname, orange, and many others.

In Middle French, alemelle shifted slightly to alumelle. In French, -elle­ is a diminutive suffix, and so is -ette, and in this case the latter influenced the former: alumelle evolved into alumette. It was during this time that the word also acquired a new meaning: “a dish of beaten eggs cooked without stirring until they’re set.”

And you probably see where we’re going now.

The first two consonants got switched around (it’s called metathesis, and it happens more than you think), so that alumette morphed into amelette; then the a eventually became an o, likely under the influence of the French word for “eggs,” œuf.

Omelette is Modern French word for the thin eggy treat, but in most English cases (especially American English, thanks in part to Noah Webster), it’s just omelet — a sort of laminated egg.