The word draw has several distinct meanings. I'll illustrate by examples. 1. Draw your weapon! 2. Draw a picture. 3. She will draw me to her by her beauty. Did this come about from one original meaning or was there more than one word which evolved into the present?
When in doubt, Dictionary.com is a fabulous resource for etymologies. "Draw" is a phonetic variant of "drag." Both words come from the Proto-Germanic verb draganan, "to carry." So we can see how the original meaning branched out into today's various senses. To "draw/drag" a weapon out of a scabbard, holster, pocket, etc. To "draw/drag" a response out of a listener. To "draw/drag" a stylus across a surface in order to scratch pictures or words on it. To "draw/drag" someone's attention or heart to you because of your astounding attractiveness or your eloquent banter. The Proto-Indo-European root was dragh-, with the specific meaning of dragging something along the ground. Descendants in other Indo-European languages include Sanskrit dhrajati, "pull," Russian drogi, "wagon," Slovene trag, "trace," and Latin trahere from which we get a whole family of words like "tract" and from which Spanish gets its word traer, to pull or carry and traje, "suit of clothes."
Take a drag on a cigarette. A chimney draws. Take a pull on a bottle. Draft beer. Freight wagons used to be called drays. Draft horses. I'm not sure how the "draft" of a ship fits in.
The dictionary includes it with all the other definitions. This means that it is the same word from the same origin, merely a different but related (no matter how tenuously) definition. I am not a water person and know exactly zero about sailing. Perhaps it has something to do with how far a vessel can be drawn down by gravity before its buoyancy reaches equilibrium. These days, there's almost everything.com . That's always the first place to look. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I reviewed that article before I posted. I don't see anything in there that explains why the specific word "draft" is used for this measure (the draft of a watercraft). Did I miss something? Yes, riverboat pilots needed to know if they were in danger of grounding in shallow water so a crewman lowered a rod or rope into the water to determine its depth. It was marked with standard units so the crewman could shout out "mark four!" "mark three!" etc. and the pilot would automatically know how much clearance he had. Twain is a nearly obsolete form of the word "two," a remnant of the era before Middle English shed all vestiges of grammatical gender except in pronouns (he/she, him/her, his/hers -- and Chinese doesn't even have those). It was retained because "to" and "too" are homonyms for "two," which could (and sometimes still do) cause a misunderstanding; and also because poets like to have alternatives for common words. "East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet." Few of us in the 21st century would ever write or speak the word, but we all still understand it. Back to the riverboat... when shouting over the noise of the river, the crew, the passengers, the other boats, and nature itself, "mark two" might have been lost or misunderstood. So "mark twain" became standard riverboat jargon. Samuel Longhorn Clemens, one of America's most beloved authors (largely due to his sense of humor) had spent some time working on riverboats in his youth, so he adopted "Mark Twain" as his pen name. Canadian country/western singer Shania Twain, on the other hand, came by the surname honestly. She was born Eilleen Regina Edwards, but her mother divorced her father, Clarence Edwards, and married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa who ran a reforestation business in Ontario. After singing semi-professionally as a child and teen, she took the name Shania when she decided to make music her career. She claimed that it is an Ojibwa word meaning "on my way," but neither native speakers nor linguistic scholars have been able to find any word or phrase--even mispronounced or garbled--to confirm that.
