<<From Ed Souder:
I love your site. I am a pilot and I've always wondered where the word cockpit comes from.
Quite simply, it is a pit (or other enclosed area) where the "sport" of cock-fighting is conducted. This literal sense dates from the mid-16th century but by the end of the century it had also come to mean a theater. Shakepeare used it thus in 1599:
Can this Cock-Pit hold
The vastie fields of France? Or may we cramme
Within this Woodden O, the very Caskes
That did affright the Ayre at Agincourt?
- Henry V, Prologue
Just over a century later, around 1700, it acquired yet another meaning: "The after part of the orlop deck of a man-of-war; forming ordinarily the quarters for the junior officers, and in action devoted to the reception and care of the wounded."
The first recorded use of cockpit to mean "the place in an airplane where the pilot sits" was in 1914. Then, in 1935 it was also applied to the analogous space in a racing car.
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<<Dear Word Detective: I have tried for years to find the derivation of "cockpit." Any information would be greatly appreciated. And when I say years, I mean years, so if you know this, you are in very select company. -- Bob Bardagy, via the internet.
Well, shucks, Bob, I'll have you know that I'm already in very select company. After all, I live right down the block from Jerry Seinfeld, now that he's moved back to New York City. Of course, his apartment doesn't have all the neat things Chez Detective does, such as the built-in exercise facilities (five flights of stairs) and fresh running water from the ceiling when it rains. Still, one mustn't gloat, I suppose. Perhaps I'll send him one of these lovely cats as a housewarming gift.
You say that you've spent years searching for the origin of "cockpit," but it could be worse. You could have been pounding the pavement on the trail of "cocktail," which is one of the most infuriatingly obscure words in general usage. No one knows the origin of cocktail (so don't bother asking me), though there are dozens of theories ranging from the merely bizarre to the seriously wacked. Fittingly enough, "cocktail" has driven generations of etymologists to drink.
"Cockpit," however, is pretty straightforward. The first "cockpits" were actual pits in the ground constructed (to the extent that one "constructs" a pit) to house "cockfights" to the death between game cocks (essentially very belligerent chickens). Cockfighting, a barbaric "sport" usually conducted for gambling purposes, probably originated in ancient China and remains distressingly popular around the world.
As a name for the scene of such grisly matches, "cockpit" showed up in English in the 16th century. By the 1700's, "cockpit" was being used as a metaphor for any scene of combat, especially areas (such as parts of Belgium and France) known as traditional battlefields. "Cockpit" was then adopted by pilots in World War I, who applied it to the cramped operating quarters of their fighter planes. Our modern sense of cockpit includes the entire crew areas of large airliners, which are usually fairly spacious and not, one hopes, the scene of conflict.>>
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