Bothe

Part of speech: determiner, pronoun, conjunction

Definitions

1. An obsolete spelling of the word both, meaning the two of them together or each of two things considered as a pair
2. An archaic variant of both, used to refer to two people or things taken together as one group
3. Old form of both, signifying two individuals or items considered jointly and equally in a statement

Etymology: "Bothe" is simply an older spelling of "both", the word for two things taken together. Its ancestry goes back to Old English "bā þā", meaning roughly "both the" or "both those", where "bā" was the form used for two things. The Old English word was a remnant of the Indo-European dual, a grammatical number specifically for pairs, which most of its relatives have since dropped in favour of ordinary plurals. In Middle English the word took the shape "bothe" or "boþe", and it may have been strengthened by Old Norse "báðir", which carried the same sense of "both" and came into contact with English during the Viking Age. That reinforcement helps explain why the word lasted when the older form "bō" was pushed aside. "Bō" came from Old English "bā" and was replaced by the "both" forms. Across the North Sea, the same word survives in German "beide", Dutch "beide", and West Frisian "beide", so the pairing idea is shared by close neighbours of English. The Scandinavian forms "både" and "båda" show the same root in a different shape, which suggests a common Germanic ancestor, Proto-Germanic "*bai".