AboutCarol Pozefsky Expertise Etymology: The origins of English words and phrases.
Anchor/Reporter NBC and CBS Networks. News Director 3 Regional Radio Stations.
Question What is the etymology of "All hands ahoy!"
Answer
Hello, I hope you're having a fine week,
First, let's address the word 'ahoy'. A well documented source had this to write:
Ahoy in English goes back well over a century further, at least as far as 1751, when Tobias Smollett used it in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle: “While he was thus occupied, a voice, still more uncouth than the former, bawled aloud, ‘Ho! the house, a-hoy!’”
It’s based on hoy, an even older cry dating from medieval times, a formalised spelling of a natural or inarticulate cry. The first person known to have written it down was William Langland, in his poem Piers Plowman, in the fourteenth century. It was used when driving pigs or cattle, or when you wanted to attract a person’s attention.
In particular — and this is where a maritime connection really does appear — sailors used it to hail another ship. Ahoy was a development of this that added force to the cry.
I was wakened — indeed, we were all wakened, for I could see even the sentinel shake himself together from where he had fallen against the door-post — by a clear, hearty voice hailing us from the margin of the wood: “Block house, ahoy!” it cried. “Here’s the doctor.”
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (1883).
Alexander Graham Bell suggested ahoy as the way to answer his new telephone and operators at the first exchange did just that. This seemed too peremptory for others and hello replaced it, a word of the early nineteenth-century that was based on earlier shouts such as the hunting-field cry hollo!
Using 'hands' to mean crewmembers is what's known as a 'synedoche', that is, a metaphoric form in which a part signifies the whole and less general stands fgor more general or vice versa.
(another example would be using 'Washington' to mean the entire federal government.) The nautical use of the word 'hands' in this way dates back to the 15th century.
Put it all together and you get "All hands ahoy" which, as you probably already know, means
Attention all crewmembers!
The best to you always, Carol P.
