If you glance through a fourteenth-century cookbook, you will see many strange words, but one will appear more than almost any other. That word is nym, meaning take, and it was used in Middle English sentences like this—”Nym a pond of ris, seth hem fort it berste”—a sentence that actually means this—”Take a pound of rice and boil it till it swells.” Because nym was used so often, essentially every time the cook was instructed to take a new ingredient, fourteenth-century recipes came to be known as nyms. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, the culinary nym had all but vanished, having been replaced by the current idiom, take. At the beginning of the seventeenth century nym did manage a comeback, but not as term within cookbooks; instead, nym—which was now spelt nim—came to mean take in the sense of steal; the word was even used as a noun to mean a pickpocket. Nim itself is now defunct, but a related form lives on: nimble, which originally referred to a person’s ability to take or apprehend something quickly.