Receive the Prince in the Hall and Chase the Occupants into the Cellar

What a wonderfully strange thing language is !  Every word that we utter has its own ancestry, its own story; and what extraordinary stories these can be !

One of the many books on language on my shelves is Eric Partridge's Origins - a weighty volume in spite of the modest subtitle that its author gives it:  A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English.

Partridge arranges this dictionary alphabetically by 'word elements', so when you look up (say) 'origin', it instructs you 'See orient'.    Well, you can understand, even if you don't quite know what the relationship is, that there might be a connection between these two words starting with 'ori-' .  But what is it ?  So we look up orient and find that both orient and origin come from a Latin verb oriri, meaning to 'arise'.  We get the point - the origin of things is 'how they arise';  and the orient means the East because that's where the sun 'arises'.

But I have just found an old envelope with some scribbled pencil notes of mine that remind me how unexpected some of these word origins are.  You look up occult in Partridge's book, and you are told to 'See hall'.  What on earth can be the connection ?  It turns out that the word hall is derived from Indo-European khal, khel, khol or khul, denoting a small space or hut in which you might hide things; from which our language (via the Anglo-Saxons) got the word cellar (where you hide the drink, perhaps); and the terms cell and hall.  From the same Indo-European terms came Latin and Greek verbs implying 'hiding':  Latin celare and Greek kaluptein.  And the second syllable of our E word occult is derived from the same source.  So our words cellar, hall, hell and occult all share the same origins (not to mention hulk, conceal and cellulose, apocalypse and - perhaps, says Partridge - calypso).

Now let's look up occupant.  "See capability" says Partridge.  I'll leave you to work that out for yourself. Useful hint: these two words are related to receive, prince and chase. I bet you're more baffled than ever now.

Receive the Prince in the Hall and Chase the Occupants into the Cellar