Here’s looking at you, kid: How the term for a young goat made the leap to children

When Deborah Niemann tells you about her kids, ask for clarification: “When people hear me … talk about my kids, it’s not always obvious … are you talking about the two-legged kind, or kids ones in the barn?” she admits.

The potential for a mixup is understandable given that Niemann is the author of Raising Goats Naturally and the host of the podcast For the Love of Goats. For most of us, though, if someone says they need to check on the kids, we assume they are talking about the children.

Where did the word “kid” come from, and how did it become a synonym for children? In this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week series, we separate the sheep from the goats and trace the word back to its origins.

The Vikings wreaked havoc – and yet had a homey touch

Kid entered the English language as a term for the offspring of a goat some 1,000 years ago as Vikings from Scandinavia (mainly modern-day Denmark and Norway) increasingly chose permanent settlement over raiding in northern and eastern England, according to Rob Watts, a journalist who hosts RobWords, a popular YouTube channel.

He says people are not surprised to learn that words such as ransack, berserk, and knife come from the Vikings — after all, their reputation for mayhem precedes them. But, Watts points out, the Vikings are also responsible for placing husband, window, egg, and kid in the English lexicon.

“During that period you have Vikings marrying Anglo-Saxon women and starting bilingual households. So we see a lot of quite mundane … words passing between Old Norse and Old English,” says Watts.

Large-scale Viking settlement in England was established from about the mid-800s to mid-900s A.D., a time known as the Danelaw, or “law of the Danes.” It was during this time that “kid” supplanted the earlier English word for a young goat, “ticcen.”

Around the turn of the 17th century, in Shakespeare’s time, “kid” was beginning to be used interchangeably to mean either a young goat, a child or young adult. “It must have been something about the goaty vibes—sprightly, energetic, curious, bouncy,” Watts says. “That metaphor just caught people’s imagination.”

Niemann knows all about those “goaty vibes” – the young animals jump around, they climb all over their mothers – and they nurse insatiably. What’s more, “baby goats … put everything in their mouths, just like human babies,” she says.

Doug Harper, the creator of the Online Etymology Dictionary, says it wasn’t for a few centuries after its first appearance that “kid” (in the non-goat sense) really caught on. “In the early 1800s, ‘kid’ starts to be picked up again in slang as a term for a young person – especially a skillful, artful one.”

And sometimes mischievous – or worse. The word was even used for boxers and thieves. “Billy the Kid comes out of that,” he notes.

The word “kidnap” combines the modern sense of kid with the English verb nab or nap, meaning “to seize.” As Harper explains, “The original kidnappers would snatch children — orphans and street kids alike — from the streets and [sell them] … as indentured servants.”

Are you kidding?

The use of kid as a verb also crops up in the 1800s, says Watts. It originates from the idea of playing someone for a kid, which “comes out of the criminal underworld… fooling them while someone steals their money off them while they’re not looking,” he says. Over time, it “morphed into a word meaning to hoodwink someone or, more playfully, just to joke with them.”

But “kidding” is also the season when baby goats are born, a fact that provides Niemann and her fellow goat enthusiasts an occasional bit of mirth. “A lot of people really enjoy the double meaning,” she says. “We’ll be talking about kidding season and then add, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not kidding – this actually happened.'”

Finally, a topic we handle with particular care — almost, you might say, with kid gloves. There appears to be confusion about the supposed origin of that phrase. Some might assume that “treating something with kid gloves” refers to using small, child-sized mittens.

“It’s not about children at all. It’s gloves made of kid skin (goat skin) thought to be particularly soft and delicate,” according to Watts.

That made kid gloves the perfect choice for a servant handling fine silverware, where even a fingerprint could spoil the dinner presentation.