The story
- Proto-Celtic · derived from*brāgants
- Old English · inherited frombeorgan“shelter”
- Middle English · inherited fromberw-ham
- English todaybraffin
A variant form of bargham (“horse collar”), of which other forms include bahfam, barcom, barfing, bariham, barsham, braffam, and (with the morphemes reversed) hamburgh, from Middle English berw-ham, bergham, from Old English beorgan (“shelter”) + ham (“cover”). Or else, a link with Welsh breuant (“throat”), from Proto-Celtic *brāgants, has been suggested.
Words from the same roots
Old Englishbeorgan all →
barrow
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.