sundry

A woman was asking me in the bookstore for some item the other day--I can't now remember what it was--but we found it and she said "Ah, you keep it in with the sundries." "Sundries" is a good word I  hadn't heard for awhile. I think within my living experience there used to be departments in stores called "sundries", but at least in my neck of the woods it has been "rebranded". In our store, the department is usually called "sidelines", even though ''sidelines" has a tendency in the book biz to become more and more the main show.

The phrase "all and sundry" is nice, too, though I have probably read it somewhere more recently than used it or heard it used.

It's a nice Sunday word, I think, though I'm guessing it has no connection to either Sunday or the sun, but think it might be somewhat connected to the word "asunder", though I don't yet know how.

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The word may still be used very commonly in some places, but just in case your place isn't one of them, a thesaurus is full of alternate words. An assortment, a hodgepodge, a variety, and, in a store, another nice term that is fading away, "a notions department" might fill your needs as easily. "Odds and ends" would be yet another rough synonym.

"Sundry" comes from the Old English word syndrig, which meant "separate, apart, special". This connects it with many words that have the theorized ProtoIndoEuropean root, *sen(e), which has to do with separation. It's a bit ironic that it's come to mean a bunch of things that are not separated, but I think the "many separate things" idea is probably what's behind it.

I was a bit surprised to learn (thanks, as usual, to the Online Etymology Dictionary) that the term "all and sundry" predates sundries by a long shot--1389 vs. 1755. I would have thought it would be the other way.

But I am pleased to find that sundry IS related to "asunder", again through the Old English. Asunder is a contraction of on sundran, the sundran having to do with being apart or separate. And I found a nice little phrase used in Middle English "to know asunder", which meant to distinguish or tell apart.

I'm for bringing that one back. And though it's not from Middle English, here is a nice example.

HMS Endeavor