Q&A: ‘Gold’ vs ‘golden’

Each week here at the Australian Writers’ Centre, we dissect and discuss, contort and retort, ask and gasp at the English language and all its rules, regulations and ridiculousness. It’s a celebration of language, masquerading as a passive-aggressive whinge about words and weirdness. This week, we're going for gold…

Q: Hi AWC, what’s the deal with the word “GOLD”?

A: Well, it’s pretty old. Can you guess where it comes from?

Q: I’m going to go with Latin.

A: Nice try, but nope – their word was “aurum”. And it’s the reason the chemical symbol for the element gold is “Au”.

Q: Okay, so where DID it come from then?

A: The noun for the shiny, soft metal was in use as early as the 12th century, likely from Old German “gold” and Dutch “goud”. They came from the root “ghel” meaning “to shine”. This same lineage gave us words like “glimmer”, “glitter”, “glow” and “gloss”.

Q: What about the adjective?

A: To describe something as “gold” – i.e. the colour itself – started in the 13th century, but the metal itself would not be described as gold in its appearance until the 1400s.

Q: Wait. What’s the difference between describing something as “gold” and “golden”?

A: That’s a great question. Writers and poets will wax lyrical, using each fairly interchangeably. But while “golden” started life in the 1300s to mean anything “made of gold”, by the 1400s it was used to describe “the colour of gold”.

Q: Like golden hair or golden flakes of breakfast cereal?

A: Yep. This leaves things actually made from gold – e.g. a gold medal, gold ring etc – using the adjective “gold”. There are of course exceptions however.

Q: Are gold medals made from actual gold then?

A: Another common question (especially from cash-strapped Olympic athletes!). The first “gold medal” to denote a first prize was given out in 1757 according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. Meanwhile, gold medals weren’t given out at the Olympics until the third modern games of 1904. And those first ones were in fact, solid gold.

Q: Pay day!

A: Yes, but since the Olympics of 1920, gold medals are required to be made from 92.5% silver – although they still must contain at least 6 grams of pure gold.

Q: It seems so many things use the term “gold” or “golden” these days.

A: It’s true. From the 1400s on, “golden” became synonymous with “excellent, precious, best, most valuable” giving us figurative terms like “golden age”. Then from the 1600s, “golden” came to be seen as “favourable or auspicious” – giving us terms like “golden law” or “golden ratio”.

Q: Oh, “auspicious” – like “au” for gold!

A: No, it’s not related.

Q: What about that TV show The Gilded Age? Is that also another way to say golden?

A: Yeah, around the late 1500s, the verb “gild” came to mean applying a thin layer of gold to something. This was originally described as “gilt” but became “gilded”.

Q: I guess the gilt just got too much to bear…

A: Hilarious. By the way, the TV show didn’t come up with that name. The “Gilded Age” was an era of American history roughly spanning 1870–1900. It was first coined in the novel The Gilded Age, co-authored by Mark Twain.

Q: Okay, what are some other gold terms?

A: “Gold rush” came along in 1859, just in time for the gold rushes of the late 19th century. Meanwhile, San Francisco Bay’s entrance channel was first given the name “Golden Gate” by American explorer John Fremont in 1846. He named it to complement the “Golden Horn” harbour entrance in Istanbul, Turkey. He saw it as “a golden gate to trade with the Orient”.

Q: What about goldfish though? They’re orange.

A: Well, back in early China, these small carp fish were a dull yellow, with mutations creating flecks of yellow/orange varieties that resembled gold. Further selective breeding has led to the dominant bold orange today.

Q: Do music albums still “go gold”?

A: They do – although sales numbers for qualifying are different depending on the country. The first description of a “gold record” happened in 1948 (on the one-millionth copy of Frankie Lane's That's My Desire), while the term “to go gold” in a musical sense didn’t surface until the late 1960s.

Q: I love that song, “I ain’t sayin’ she's a gold digger…” 

A: Well, we ain’t messin’ when we say that long before Kanye/Ye’s 2005 hit song, the term “gold digger” was first used in the early 1800s to describe someone actually digging up gold from the ground. The term for “a person who forms a relationship with another purely to extract money from them” wouldn’t appear in literature around 1915, and by the 1930s had spread globally.

Q: What about “sitting on a gold mine”?

A: The idea of a literal gold mine has been a thing for centuries, but the figurative term “gold mine” – to mean any source of great wealth – is from 1882. (A time when, amusingly, many people were probably sitting atop actual gold mines.)

Q: And having “a heart of gold”?

A: That one comes from Shakespeare’s play Henry V from 1599. You’ll also find “all that glitters (originally “glisters”) is not gold” from his 1597 play Merchant of Venice.

Q: And finally, “worth your weight in gold”?

A: This one is much older – actually starting life in Ancient Rome.

Q: I think about it often!

A: Good to know. We’ve previously discussed that the Romans paid soldiers using salt – a valuable commodity at the time. So the original saying was to be “worth one’s weight in salt” (much later becoming “worth one’s salt”). The more precious “gold” replaced “salt” when the phrase debuted in English around the 1200s.

Q: I’ve met plenty of great people who are figuratively worth their weight in gold. But is anyone literally worth their weight in gold?

A: Sure. Pure gold is currently worth about $116,000AUD per kilogram. So plenty of babies and children, although an adult might need at least six million dollars. 

Q: It’s always nice to feel valued…

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