“It’s your turn now,” said the young woman. Just what she meant the young man concerned did not tell me, nor would I tell you if he had; what young people get up to together really is their business. Yet the phrase has stuck in my mind.

It’s a banal one, goodness knows: your turn or my turn to do something. Yet the word turn is a wonderful example of the versatility of language. Many English words have dozens of meanings; turn has scores.

It was born in Latin as tornus, a lathe, and an accompanying mediaeval Latin verb, tornare, to turn wood on a lathe. Its basic meaning today is change (of) direction, but that has grown into countless other senses, many of them hard to relate to the original, and some distinctly idiomatic — often dying out, as idioms tend to.

A turn in the road or a right turn are clear enough; the turn of the tide, or of the year, one step further; a turn for the better, ditto. So too such compound nouns as turntable or turncoat. But turnover is not so obvious; in business, it began life as coins the merchant turned over. Food is done to a turn, just right, when it needs to be turned over in the pan.

But how did we reach do a good turn, or a stage turn, or take a turn round the block. Or turn of mind? Or turn of phrase? Or serve his turn? Or the old colloquial Briticism, it gave me quite a turn, a nasty shock? How indeed my turn or your turn; or their cousin out of turn? I can’t guess, nor do dictionaries tell me. And the noun has many further technical meanings, like the stock-market turn, the gap between a share’s buying and selling prices.

Your turn

As for the verb, it has run riot, especially when followed by some preposition. You can spot the basic meaning in turn a corner, or turn round a buoy; or in plain turn round, that is, through 180 degrees (like a soldier turning tail, or a boat turning turtle); and hence in a propeller turning, moving round continuously. Turn to stone has kept the notion of change, losing any idea of direction. Here’s a tale that piles up rival meanings.

As if by magic, a Sufi turned up, begging for alms. The grand vizier turned him down, and had the guard turned out. Turn away this half-clothed beggar, he ordered, and then turn him out.

The prince himself, turning away from this ugly scene, first decided to take a turn in his park, but then turned out of the palace gates and up a side-street, before turning into the park. That turned out to be unwise. Many of the Sufi’s followers had turned out to see what would happen, and the prince, elegantly turned out until that moment, found he’d suddenly been turned into a ragged beggar himself.

Yet a prince he was: rather than turn back, without turning a hair he turned off the road, turned in at the king’s castle, and having turned over his misadventure in his mind, decided to turn in (go to bed) there. He turned down his MP3, turned off the light, turned over in bed — and found he’d been turned back into a prince after all.

Sure, it’s a silly concoction. But it makes my point about turn’s multiplicity of meanings — and a wider point: here are some 25 of them, yet the whole tale has no ambiguity. Context is all. So too is time. While I, unlike the prince, am turned off by today’s pop music, a century ago, in some slump, I might have been turned off by my employer. And a century before that, by the public hangman.

And if any reader can concoct a sillier tale, send it to me. It’s your turn now.