elope: [17] Etymologically, elope signifies ‘leap away’. It was originally an Anglo-Norman legal term applied to a married woman running off with a lover, and only in the past couple of hundred years has it come to be applied to a couple leaving home to get married when parental permission is denied. It is thought that the Anglo-Norman term was an adaptation of Middle English *alopen, past participle of an unrecorded verb *alepen ‘run away’, which would have been formed from the prefix a- ‘away’ and lepen ‘run, leap’ (source of modern English leap and related to lope and German laufen ‘run’). => leap, lope
