gore

English has three separate words gore, two of them perhaps ultimately related. Gore ‘blood’ [OE] originally meant ‘dung, shit’, or more generally ‘filth, dirt, slime’, and related words in other languages, such as Dutch goor ‘mud, filth’, Old Norse gor ‘slime’, and Welsh gôr ‘pus’, round out a semantic picture of ‘unpleasant semi-liquid material’, with frequent specific application to ‘bodily excretions’. It was from this background that the sense ‘blood’, and particularly ‘coagulated blood’, emerged in the mid-16th century. Gore ‘triangular piece of cloth, as let into a skirt’ [OE] comes from Old English gāra ‘triangular piece of land’ (a sense preserved in the London street-name Kensington Gore). This was related to Old English gār ‘spear’ (as in garlic; see GOAD), the semantic connection being that a spearhead is roughly triangular. Gore ‘wound with horns’ [14] originally meant simply ‘stab, pierce’; it too may come ultimately from gār ‘spear’, although there is some doubt about this. => GARLIC