Q: I saw this sentence the other day in Two Faced Murder, a 1946 mystery by Jean Leslie: “The professor is yclept Peter, and I hate to have him called Pete.” What’s with “yclept” here?
A: The word “yclept” is an old adjective that means named, called, or by the name of. So “the professor is yclept Peter” is an old-fashioned way of saying the professor is named Peter.
The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, labels “yclept” archaic, but several standard dictionaries include it without a label—that is, as standard English.
Merriam-Webster online, for example, says the adjective may be old, “but it’s still got some presence in the living language.” M-W says “yclept appears (usually in playful contexts) in phrases like ‘We ventured to a pub, yclept Ye Olde Watering Hole.’ ”
The Old English ancestor of “yclept” was geclypod, past participle or participial adjective of the verb clypian, “to cry, call; to call on, appeal to (a person), for or after (a thing),” according to the OED.
Ultimately, these words are derived from kom (beside, near, by, with), a prehistoric base that’s been reconstructed by linguists, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.
The earliest OED citation for the verb, which we’ve expanded here, is from a ninth-century Old English gloss, or translation, of the eighth-century Latin in the Vespasian Psalter. In this passage, cleopiu is the first person singular of clypian.
“dryhten gehereð me ðnne ic cleopiu to him” (“the Lord hears me when I call to him”). The Old English gloss was written between the lines of the Latin psalms.
The first Oxford citation for the participial adjective (spelled gicliopad) is from a manuscript, written around 1000, that contains an early Latin-Old English version of the Christian liturgy conducted at the Cathedral Church of Durham. Here we’ll translate both the Latin and the Old English:
“Dignus vocari apostolus” (“worthy to be called an apostle”), “wyrðe þætte ic se gicliopad erendwraca” (“may I be worthy to be called a messenger”). From Rituale Ecclesiae Dunelmensis (1840), edited by Joseph Stevenson.
In Old and Middle English, the prefixes “ge-,” “i-,” and “y-” were used to form past participles and participial adjectives. In the example above, “gi-” is apparently a scribe’s variant spelling of “ge-.”
This “i-” example in the OED, which we’ve expanded, is from The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, an account of early British history written in Middle English sometime before 1300:
“Al þis was ȝwile icluped þe march of walis” (“All this was once called the March of Wales”). Oxford notes that in other scribal versions of the passage the term was written “ycleped, icleped, clepud, callyde, callyd.”
The dictionary’s earliest “y-” example is from Arthour & Merlin, an anonymous Middle English romance written around 1330: “Her ost was ycleped Blaire” (“Her host was called Blaire”).
The usage was common in Middle English, the dictionary says, but it was considered “a literary archaism” by the early Modern English of Elizabethan times and was “often used for the sake of quaintness or with serio-comic intention.”
The OED cites Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), where Shakespeare uses “ycliped” comically in a letter from the long-winded Spaniard Don Adriano de Armado to Ferdinand, King of Navarre.
In explaining how he caught the fool Costard consorting with a country girl, Jaquenetta, in the king’s park, supposedly for men only, Armado writes, “Now for the ground Which? which I meane I walkt vpon, it is ycliped Thy Park.”
The word “yclept” in its various spellings was rarely seen in the 16th and 17th centuries, but had a burst of popularity in the 18th and 19th before falling out of favor in the 20th, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books.
Although it’s not common now, “yclept” does appear every once in a while. In the Jean Leslie novel you noticed, Two Faced Murder, Professor Peter Ponsonby and his fiancée, Mara Mallery, are asked to search for a missing faculty wife. Maura uses “yclept” in introducing Peter to another faculty member.
We’ll end with a more recent appearance, one we especially like. Here’s the opening of “My Man Bertie,” a review by Christopher Buckley of Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (2013), by Sebastia Faulks:
“What, ho? A new Jeeves and Wooster novel? Steady on. Your faithful reviewer may not be the brightest bulb in the old marquee, but dash it, isn’t this anno dom 2013, and didn’t ‘the Master’—yclept Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (‘Plum’ to his chums)—shove off across the old Rio Styx back in 1975?”
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