According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Rowling coined Muggle and probably based it on the earlier noun mug, which refers to a foolish or stupid person (though it goes without saying that foolishness or stupidity is not a hallmark of Muggles).īut Rowling wasn't the first to coin the word muggle. It's a noun ("The Dursleys are Muggles") and can be used attributively (as in "the Muggle world," above). Rowling created an entire vocabulary to separate the wizarding world from the Muggle world. The Harry Potter world is divided into the magical and the mundane, and J.K. Rowling, in interview with Christopher Lydon on “The Connection”, WBRU Radio, 12 Oct. Because Albus Dumbledore is very fond of music, I always imagined him as sort of humming to himself a lot. “Dumbledore” is an old English word meaning bumblebee. What about Rowling? Is she somehow implying that Albus Dumbledore is lazy or dull? Not at all: Bumblebees, with their bobbing, wavering, slow flight, might have looked dull or lazy, which accounts for the combination of dore and the dumb-adjacent prefix dumble. Dore, or dor, is a word that dates back to almost 700 AD and refers to bees or flies. What is the burnie-bee? Is it not the humble-bee, or what we call the “dumble dore,”-a word whose descriptive droning deserves a place in song?ĭumble- was a prefix that was used to refer to various insects, and it has close cousins in humble-, bumble-, and dummel-, which some etymologists tie to dumb. Dumbledore, the name given to the headmaster of Hogwarts and one of the preeminent wizards of the Potter universe, is an 18th-century word for a bumblebee: Sometimes, the connection between a borrowed name and the character that bears that name isn’t always clear.
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