Christmas words: ornaments, decorations and baubles
I decided that since ‘tinsel’ was the only thing I had on my etymology tree, I wanted another word to go with it, but I couldn’t decide which of these three was the most Christmas-y for me. It also took me a while to disambiguate them in my mind, but I’ve decided that ‘decorations’ is the hypernym for all Christmas tree items, including lights, tinsel and candy canes, ‘ornaments are those hanging things that aren’t lights, tinsel and candy canes, and ‘baubles’ are glass or plastic hollow objects that are usually spherical.
I looked up these words and their frequency across the Google Books corpus using Google Ngrams. Only ‘decoration’ returned any numbers when paired with ‘Christmas’, it’s also remained relatively stable over time, while ornament has declined in use, which I doubt has anything to do with Christmas, and more the fact that it does feel like an old word that I only dust off with the Christmas tree ornaments these days.
Ornament, decoration and bauble all come to English from Latin, via French, and all have usage beyond Christmas, but I think of them all as Christmas words. Decoration in Australian usage is informally shortened to ‘deccy’. Some online sleuthing suggests this shortening is also in UK English, but it doesn’t appear in any of the major dictionaries.
At Superlinguo, I celebrate the silly season with Christmasy words. The full list is here. If you’ve got a Christmas word you’re curious about, let me know! References in these posts thanks to the always-reliable Oxford English Dictionary the Macquarie Dictionary and Etymoline.
The Christmas Words Full List
