While solving a crossword puzzle or reading an interesting article, you may have come across the word "end" or "ends". Many may say that the answer is quite simple. But, this is only at first glance.
What are ends?
In Russian there are about five transcripts of this word. They relate to construction, to geometry, the name of settlements and rivers. And few people realize that the meaning of the word "ends" is completely different. Let's figure it out now.
Tortsy is a word that came from thieves' everyday life and means "matches". And it's safe to say that few people know about it. Thieves' jargon is rarely used in everyday life of ordinary citizens.
A little about matches
The first mention of matches appeared in the Chinese Empire more than two thousand years ago. Then they looked like thin torches with ends soaked in sulfur. Such a device helped to reduce the ignition time of the hearth, the torch from the smoldering tinder. At that time, tinder and flint and steel were the most common ways of making fire.
In the Middle Ages, matches appeared in Europe. Then they had a slightly different look, and for the right to be called an inventorseveral people struggled. But they became most similar to modern ones already at the end of the eighteenth, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Their peculiarity was that each manufactory involved in the production used its own technology for the combustible head. One of the inventors came up with a very sensitive composition that could provoke a fire by rubbing matches against each other.
Perhaps the word "ends" is about the process of making fire. After all, wooden sticks could be ignited by scratching on any rough surface: the sole of a shoe, a rough fabric, a fairly even stone.
Other meanings of the word
Someone may be indignant and say that the ends are the side parts of any building that are not on the "front" part of the building. They will also be right. However, one should be careful with this concept. After all, buildings that have arches, a colonnade and a central entrance in the narrow part are undesirable to call the "end".
Ends are also individual parts of the wooden tiles used to build bridges. Most often this happened in those areas where there was plenty of wood in the nearby forests. So in ancient Novgorod, layers of wooden slabs overlapped each other for more than four centuries.
If you come across the word "ends", perhaps its meaning is much more interesting than it might seem at first glance.
