jungle

Our word jungle has come to specify "land overgrown with underwood, long grass, or tangled vegetation; also, the luxuriant and often almost impenetrable growth of vegetation covering such a tract" (OED). Over time the word has taken on diverse spellings, including "jangal," "jingle," and "jungul." Interestingly, the word’s origin is not so delineated as its modern usage. Jungle came into English from the Hindi and Marathi jangal, meaning "desert, waste, forest." The word originates in the Sanskrit jangala, which signifies "dry; dry ground, desert." The OED highlights the similarity in the gradual progression of the meanings of jungle and forest from "wasteland" to "dense flora." Specifically, the OED states: "The change in Anglo-Indian use may be compared to that in the historical meaning of the word forest in its passage from a waste or unenclosed tract to one covered with wild wood. In the transferred sense of jungle there is apparently a tendency to associate it with tangle." It seems that we perhaps witness a type of folk etymology in the word jungle, in that its meaning came to resemble or approximate that of a like-sounding word, tangle. The word jungle is often modified for figurative usage, as in "blackboard jungle (in schools), asphalt jungle, concrete jungle (in cities)." Another interesting nuance is the fluctuating in spelling over time. The OED entry demonstrates some disagreement on the part of authors over the centuries. The jungle spelling was used as early as 1776, but the jangal spelling (the one closest to the linguistic parent) was used as late as 1900.