On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Kenneth Gorelick wrote: #To the esteemed Dr. Whom, philologist extraordinaire, greetings! # #Thank you for the OED ref. I understood that access to that resource #was costly so I did not search it out myself. This is the first word #for which I am aware of an Icelandic origin! My pleasure. Access to OED online is one of the perks of my job. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. -- Mark A. Mandel Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania