Long Odds

Everyone’s got Odyssey fever now, so bear with me for a moment. The phrase long odds began dancing around in my mind the other night, and I started wondering if there might be some connection with the ancient literary work.

Odyssey means journey to us nowadays. It means you’re going to be gone for a long time, and you might not return in the best shape—if you return at all. In other words, your odds are long.

More often than not, an etymological bread crumb leads me somewhere really satisfying. The word corporation stems from the same place as corpse, and corporations are treated as a person (body) in law. Truth and tree descend from a common root (sorry, Dad!). I wondered if none might have been shorthand for not one, and I was rewarded with an affirmative answer from history.

Not so with odds and odyssey.

It turns out that the word odd is a lot more interesting than I had previously thought. My math-oriented brain turns to even and odd numbers right away, but there’s a much richer story behind why.

Go back to Old Norse, just one of the languages that had a profound impact on English. Here’s where we find oddr, which meant something like a sharp weapon point. Oddr gave birth to a cousin-word oddi, which came to mean a pointed piece of land. This eventually came to mean a triangle—a weapon point and a pointed piece of land could easily both resemble a triangle, so I get it.

A triangle has three points. It’s almost as though you have a perfect pair and then one left over, if you can imagine that a pair of points is somehow ideal. Similarly, you might have a third wheel in a relationship or conversation. You might just end up being the odd person out.

Oddi was grabbed by English, where it is recorded as odde around 1300—roughly the same time when the word everything was introduced into English and Chaucer was writing about letting sleeping dogs lie. The word retained its odd item out meaning, although it lost the extra letter E at the ende. Sorry, at the end.

If someone asked what the odds were for something to happen, they were referencing this quantitative meaning that derived from Norse triangles. By the 1500s, odds referred to the amount by which one quantity exceeded another—another use of that leftover concept. By the 1700s, long odds was in print.

2 to 1 odds are not long. 200 to 1 odds are very long.

What are the odds you’ll go see The Odyssey on a big screen this week?