huddle: [16] Huddle originally meant ‘hide’ (‘to chop off the head of the sentence, and slyly huddle the rest’, James Bell’s translation of Walter Haddon against Orosius 1581), suggesting that it could well be a derivative of the same base as produced English hide (its form indicates that it would have come via a Low German dialect). But virtually from the first huddling was more than just ‘hiding’ – it was ‘hiding in a heap or among a crowd’; and from this has developed the word’s modern meaning ‘crowd or draw together’.
