n.
- Sports. A person appointed to rule on plays, especially in baseball.
- A person appointed to settle a dispute that mediators have been unable to resolve; an arbitrator. See synonyms at judge.
v., -pired, -pir·ing, -pires. v.tr.
To act as referee for; rule or judge.
v.intr.
To be or act as a referee or an arbitrator.
[Middle English (an) oumpere, (an) umpire, alteration of (a) noumpere, a mediator, from Old French nonper : non-, non- + per, equal, even, paired (from Latin pār; see pair).]
WORD HISTORY Had it not been for the linguistic process known as false splitting or juncture loss, the angry, anguished cry "Kill the ump" could have been "Kill the nump." In the case of umpire we can almost see this process in action by studying the Middle English Dictionary entry for noumpere, the Middle English ancestor of our word. Noumpere comes from the Old French nonper, made up of non, "not," and per, "equal": as an impartial arbiter of a dispute between two people, the arbiter is not equivalent to or a partisan of either of them. In Middle English the earliest recorded form is noumper (about 1350); the earliest dated form without an n is owmpere, from 1440. How the n was lost can be seen if we compare the sequence a noounpier in a text written in 1426-1427 with the sequence an Oumper from a text written probably around 1475. The n of noumpere has here become attached to the indefinite article, giving us an instead of a and, eventually, umpire instead of *numpire. The same process of false splitting is responsible for the forms apron and adder, originally napron and naddre, as well as many other words that once began with n. False splitting also caused some words that originally began with vowels to have an n from a preceding indefinite article added on, such as nickname (from the phrase an eke name) and newt (from an eute).
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
