basket: [13] Basket is something of a mystery word. It turns up in the 13th century in Old French and Anglo-Norman as basket and in Anglo-Latin as baskettum, but how it got there is far from clear. Some have suggested that Latin bascauda ‘washing tub’, said by the Roman writer Martial to be of British origin (and thought by some etymologists to be possibly of Celtic origin), may be connected with it in some way, but no conclusive proof of this has ever been found.
