Word of Honor

This formal phrase, now somewhat out of date, encapsulates the time-honored notion that a person’s word represents a serious and binding commitment. Although the phrase word of honor is itself recorded only from 1814, the senses in which word represents “a promise,” still found in the phrases to keep, pledge , or give one’s word , are recorded in the Anglo-Saxon roots of the language. Subsequent formulations dating from the Renaissance are to take (a person) at his word, upon his word , and on my word . The idiom is obviously apparent in the opposite formulations of to break one’s word, to go back on one’s word , and so on. In feudal times, when society was graded hierarchically, there was a corresponding scale of verbal credibility. Thus in his Chesse (1474), William Caxton noted: “The simple parole or word of a prince ought to be more stable than the oath of a marchaunt” (II i), a view naturally regarded as insulting in modern egalitarian society. However, this class prejudice is traceable back to the Anglo-Saxon laws, as the relevant entry shows. The modern survival of the phrase serves to indicate the seriousness of a verbal commitment outside contexts of a formal oath.