order [ME] An early meaning of order, which comes from Latin ordo ‘row, series, rank’, was an institution founded by a ruler to honour people. The Order of the Garter, the highest order of English knighthood, was established by Edward III in around 1344. According to dubious tradition, the garter was that of the Countess of Salisbury, which fell off while she was dancing with the king. To spare her blushes he promptly picked up the garter and put it on his own leg, saying ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (shame be to him who thinks evil of it), which was adopted as the motto of the order. Order was also used to mean a rank, such as priest or bishop, in the Christian Church, which gave us the expression take orders [ME] for someone who becomes a priest. In the 16th century out of order meant ‘not in normal sequence’. The meaning was gradually extended to mean ‘not in a settled condition’, and by the 18th century to ‘not in good health’. Finally it came to be used of machinery that was not working, or behaviour that was seen as unacceptable [L18th]. The sense of the word to mean ‘a statement telling someone to do something’ is found from the 16th century. By the early 18th century doctor’s orders had established itself as a term for an instruction from your doctor that had to be obeyed. The Latin word ordo also gave us ordinary [LME] originally ‘orderly’, ordain [ME], ordinance [ME] ‘an authoritative order’, and ordnance [LME]. In the army now ordnance refers to mounted guns or artillery, but in earlier days it was also used for the official body responsible for the supply of military equipment. In 1791 the official in charge, known as the Master-General of the Ordnance, was told to organize an official survey of the south coast of England to the scale of an inch to a mile, in anticipation of a French invasion. This grew into a series covering the whole of Great Britain and Ireland and was the origin of the Ordnance Survey, which today prepares large-scale detailed maps of the United Kingdom.