Толкин ойлап тапқан «хоббит» сөзінің тарихы

Word used by J. R. R. Tolkien

The word hobbit was used by J. R. R. Tolkien as the name of a race of small humanoids in his fantasy fiction, the first published being The Hobbit in 1937. The Oxford English Dictionary, which added an entry for the word in the 1970s, credits Tolkien with coining it. Since then, however, it has been noted that there is prior evidence of the word, in a 19th century list of legendary creatures. In 1971, Tolkien stated that he remembered making up the word himself, admitting that there was nothing but his "nude parole" to support the claim that he was uninfluenced by such similar words as hobgoblin. His choice may have been affected on his own admission by the title of Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel Babbitt. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey has pointed out several parallels, including comparisons in The Hobbit, with the word "rabbit".

By Tolkien's own account, the coining of the name hobbit was a spontaneous flash of intuition. When he was busy grading examination papers, the word popped into his mind, not in isolation but as part of an entire sentence, which was to become the incipit of The Hobbit, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." Tolkien etymologized the name hobbit as the regular Modern English outcome of a hypothetical Old English *hol bytla "hole builder". Within the linguistic fiction of The Lord of the Rings, the English etymology of Old English hol bytlan → Modern English hobbit is the supposed translation of an "original" etymology of Rohirric kud dukan → Westron kuduk.

The name hobbit for a diminutive legendary creature fits into a category of English words in hob for such beings, based on the Middle English hobbe. These include hob, hobby, hobgoblin, Hobberdy Dick, Hobberdy, Hobbaty, hobbidy, Hobley, hobbledehoy, hobble, hobi, hobyn (small horse), hobby horse (perhaps from Hobin), Hobby (nickname for Robert), hobyah, Hob Lantern. This theory was reinforced when in 1977 the Oxford English Dictionary announced that it had found the source that it supposed Tolkien to have used: J. Hardy's 1895 The Denham Tracts, Volume 2, which stated that "The whole earth was overrun with ghosts, boggles hobbits, hobgoblins." The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey writes that the list was, however, of ghostly creatures without bodies, nothing like Tolkien's solid flesh and blood hobbits.