Where Did the Word Summersalt Originate?
The word “somersault,” meaning a leap in which a person tumbles heels over head in mid-air, comes from the Old French “sombresault,” which was based on the earlier form “sobresault.” Both of these French words were rooted, in turn, on a melding of the Latin “supra” (“above”) and “saltus” (meaning “to leap”), giving us the combined sense of “to leap above.” The word first appeared in English in the form “sobersault” around 1530, but by the beginning of the 19th century we were using the modern form “somersault.” Elsewhere in the world of acrobatics, albeit of a more metaphorical kind, several readers have asked why we say that a person has fallen “head over heels” in love with someone, meaning that the person had figuratively been turned upside down by his or her emotions, when the normal posture of a human being is, in fact, “head over heels.” The answer is that when the phrase first appeared around 1350 it was in the more logical form “heels over head.” Our garbled modern “head over h
