Adder or Nether

Abstract

IN his note upon dragonflies in NATURE of June 1, Dr. Tillyard asks whether the adder is still called the ‘ether’ in any part of England. I cannot answer for England, but ‘nether’ is good Lowland Scots for ‘adder’, and is given in that sense in Jamieson's “Dictionary of the Scottish Language”. Among examples given by Skeat of initial n shifting from the noun to the indefinite article, or from the article to the noun, he mentions addere and naddere as interchangeable forms in Middle English; but he says nothing on the question whether ‘adder’ comes from Anglo-Saxon neoðera, nether—the lowly one.