Etymology: < Middle French halebarde, Middle French, French hallebarde (both mid 15th cent.) < Middle High German helmbarte , hallenbarte , hellebarte , (first half of the 13th cent.; German Hellebarde ) < helm shaft, handle (see helm n.²) + barte broad-bladed axe, battleaxe (c1000 in Old High German as barta in the sense ‘axe, chopper, cleaver’), cognate with Middle Dutch barde , baerde (compare Dutch baars cooper's axe), Old Saxon barda (Middle Low German barde ), all in the sense ‘axe, chopper’, probably < the Germanic base of beard n., with allusion to the shape of the blade.History of the weapon. The medieval halberd is thought to have originated as a fighting weapon in Switzerland and Germany in the 13th cent.; the earliest known example was excavated from site of the Battle of Morgarten, Switzerland (1315). Borrowings and parallels in other languages. Words borrowed from or modelled on the German name of the weapon are attested in a number of Romance and Germanic languages. Compare Middle Dutch helmbaerde , hellebaert (Dutch hellebaard ), Middle Low German hellebarde , and also Old Occitan alebarda (late 15th cent.; Occitan alabarda ), Catalan alabarda , Spanish alabarda , † alavarda (early 16th cent.), Portuguese alabarda (mid 16th cent.), Italian alabarda (early 16th cent.). Notes on forms. Forms in hau- , haw- , har- show vocalization of l . In individual instances, these forms can be difficult to distinguish from variants in final -t of hauberk n., which are attested earlier (compare variant forms and Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French, French haubert at that entry). Where context does not clarify whether a weapon or a piece of armour is intended, ambiguous instances of this type are treated at hauberk n. Pronunciation. There is continuing variation in the pronunciation of the vowel of the first syllable in standard English. The early 17th-cent. orthoepist Gil records two competing variant pronunciations: /æ/ and /ɔː/ (the latter either reflecting late Middle English diphthongization before l or by analogy with words where this had taken place); see further E. J. Dobson Eng. Pronunc. 1500–1700 (ed. 2, 1968) II. §60. In the late 18th and early 19th cent., although the northerner Spence (1775) has /æ/, Sheridan (1780), Walker (1791), Perry (1805), and Fulton & Knight (1833) give only /ɔː/, evidently the preferred pronunciation in the London standard at that time (perhaps influenced by hauberk n.). However, by the mid 19th cent. this has been largely supplanted by /æ/ (Jameson (1828), Smart (1836), and most later dictionaries give only /æ/), although even today pronunciations with a rounded vowel ( /ɔː/ and (shortened) /ɒ/) are still sometimes heard.

Etymology: < halberd n.