Egg Whites

The QPB Dictionary of Difficult Words (ed. John Ayto) is a great book to thumb through. Random samlings uncover such treasures as gid (n. brain disease of sheep), opsimath (n. mature student; late learner), and creatic (adj. pertaining to flesh or meat).

Today I discovered glair (n. white of egg; any similar substance; v.t. cover with glair). A quick check to the As assured me that, as I had known, the term for the white part of the egg is albumen. In fact, alb is an affix having to do with white, showing up in a host of entries such as albescent (adj. becoming white; whitish) and albino. So where does glair fit into this? The entries surrounding glair in the QPB-DoDW don't offer any clues as those around albumen do, so I turned to other sources.

Fortunately, the school I live at subscribes to the online version of OED, so I was able to explore the entry for glair. Here's part of the entry:

[a. F. glaire, found in 13th c. The forms in the other Rom. languages (Pr. glara, clara, It. chiara, Sp. clara) indicate L. cl{amac}ra, fem. of cl{amac}rus bright, clear, as the source of the Fr. word.
The change of initial from c to g must have been early, as Ælfric's Gloss. (c1000) has ‘Glara, æ{asg}-lim’; some scholars have ascribed it to confusion with gl{amac}rea gravel, but this is unlikely, as there is no evidence that this word had the sense of ‘clay’ or adhesive soil. Med.L. glaria, applied to the viscid juice of grapes in Barth. De Propr. Rerum, is prob. a latinization of F. glaire.]

1. The white of an egg; freq. in full the glair of an egg, of eggs. Also, a technical term for preparations made from the whites of eggs and used in various trade-processes, esp. book-binding (see quot. 1893).

A list of quotations follow, none of which are any more help than the definition and etymology above (but this one is interesting: "Comb.

1858 SIMMONDS Dict. Trade, Glaire-dealer, a vender of broken eggs, albumen, &c."). But the OED's second definition (any similar viscid or slimy substance), along with what was listed in QPB-DoDW and the above etymology makes me think that the emphesis here is on the gooeyness of the substance rather than its color.

Indeed, the print version of Microsoft's Encarta World English Dictionary lists the first definition of glair as "egg white: a sizing, glazing, or adhesive substance made from egg white and used especially in bookbinding."

So now we know two words for the egg white: albumen and glair. Who knew?