Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Thus to huddle is to hide closely, to crowd together for protection, to crowd into a place of shelter." This is a most unsatisfactory explanation, as there is nothing in the notion of a huddle that has anything to do with either hiding or shelter. Huddle is simply heap, corresponding to the W. Flanders huttel, a bunch or tuft. " Dat gras schiet hier en daar op in huttels:" the grass shoots up here and there in tufts. " In een huttelken vallen : " to fall in a heap, to faint away. In the same dialect we have the simple hut, a bunch, tuft of leaves, of flowers, and fig. something in the sense of E. huddle: " Het is een hut:" it is a mess, it is a bad job. Thus we are brought to the Shropshire hud, to gather into heaps ; Somerset, huddel, a heap.—Halliwell. The appropriateness of the figure of a bunch or heap as the basis of the expression is shown by the use of hunch in the same sense. In a late novel it is said of a person found dead in the snow, "Huddled against the wall of the house nearest the turn to the ferry they found her." And a page or two on: "She were hunched up agen the wall of the house as stands by the turn to the river."—Aunt Hepsy's Foundling, iii. 258. HUGE.—"The etymology is much disguised by the loss of an initial a, mistaken for the English indefinite article. The right word is ahuge, from O. Fr. ahuge, huge, vast. Of unknown origin, but not improbably from the old form of mod. G. erhohen, to exalt, heighten, increase, from the adj. hoch, cognate with E. high."—Skeat. The assertion that an initial a has been lost in E. huge is in nowise warranted by the fact that only ahuge is historical in French. It is as easy to believe that an unrecorded huge was lost in French, as an unrecorded ahuge in English. And from the simple huge the O.Fr. ahuge may have bee...