September 23, 2023, marks the start of a new season—but what exactly you should call that season depends on where in the world you are. In Great Britain, the third season of the year usually has only one name: autumn. But if you hop across the Atlantic, you’ll find that people use both fall and autumn interchangeably when referring to this time of year, making it the only season in the English language with two widely accepted names. So what is it about the season that makes it so special?

2023年9月23日标志着新的季节来临，但是你要如何称呼这个季节取决于你在这个世界所在的地方。在英国，一年的第三个季节只有一个名字：autumn。但如果你来到大西洋的对岸，你会发现那里的人们常常交互使用fall和autumn来指代这个季节，于是秋天就成了唯一一个在英语中拥有两个广为接受的名字的季节。那么这个季节为什么会这么特别呢？

According to Dictionary.com, fall isn’t a modern nickname that followed the more traditional autumn. The two terms are actually first recorded within a few hundred years of each other.

根据词典网站Dictionary.com，fall不是在传统名称autumn之后出现的现代绰号。事实上，这两个词首次被记录的时间前后相差不到几百年。

Before either word emerged in the lexicon, the season between summer and winter was known as harvest, or hærfest in Old English. The word is of Germanic stock and meant “picking,” “plucking,” or “reaping,” a nod to the act of gathering and preserving crops before winter.

在这两个词被收入词典之前，夏季和冬季之间的这个季节被称为harvest（古英语是hærfest）。这个词源于日耳曼语系，意思是“采摘”或“收获”，旨在向冬季前收割和储存庄稼的行为致敬。

In the 1500s, English speakers began calling the seasons separating the cold and warm months “fall of the leaf” or “spring of the leaf,” or “fall” and “spring” for short. Both terms were simple and evocative, but for some reason, only spring had staying power in Britain. By the end of the 1600s, autumn, from the French word autompne and the Latin autumnus, had overtaken fall as the standard British term for the third season.

16世纪，以英语为母语的人开始将间隔寒冷和炎热月份的季节称作fall of the leaf或spring of the leaf，或简称为fall和spring。这两个词都是既简单又形象，但是出于某种原因，只有指代春季的spring在英国被保留了下来。到17世纪末，源于法语autompne 和拉丁语autompne 的词语autumn取代fall成为指代秋季的标准英语名称。

Around the same time England adopted autumn, the first-ever British American colonists were voyaging to North America. With them they brought the words fall and autumn, and while the former fell out of fashion overseas, it solidified itself in the local vernacular by the time America won its independence. Today, using both words to describe the season before winter is still a uniquely American behavior.

大约在英格兰人开始用autumn来指代秋季的时候，第一批殖民美国的英国人漂洋过海来到了北美。他们把fall和autumn都带到了美国，尽管前者在英国已经被弃用，但是却在美国独立之前在当地方言中站稳了脚跟。时至今日，用两个词来指代秋季依然是美国人独有的行为。