Origin of The Word "umpire"
According to the Middle English Dictionary entry for noumpere, the predecessor of umpire, came from the Old French nonper (from non, "not" + per, "equal"), meaning "one who is requested to act as arbiter of a dispute between two people", or that the arbiter is not paired with anyone in the dispute.
In Middle English, the earliest form of this shows up as noumper around 1350, and the earliest version without the n shows up as owmpere, a variant spelling in Middle English, circa 1440.
The n was lost after it was written (in 1426-1427) as a noounpier with the a being the indefinite article. The leading n became attached to the article, changing it to an Oumper around 1475; this sort of linguistic shift is called juncture loss. Thus today we say "an umpire" instead of "a numpire."
Read more about this topic: Umpire (baseball)
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