500: Avail Apr 21, 2016

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In Germanic languages, one can contract nouns together (with a hyphen in English), but in Romance languages, people tend to contract preposition-verb phrases. 'Avail' for example, comes from Middle English's obsolete 'vail' which means ‘be of use or value’. This word is related to 'valor' and is ultimately derived from the Latin 'valere' meaning ‘be strong’. Some believe that 'avail' was created on the pattern of pairs such as 'amount', was originally a verb. First, the contraction was Old French from amont meaning ‘upward,’ or more literally, ‘uphill’ coming from the Latin phrase 'ad montem' of the same meaning.

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