Those who voted in person this year made a trip to the “polls,” or “polling stations,” to cast their ballots. But “polls” also refer to opinion surveys about the candidates in the weeks leading up to the election. Joe Biden was taking comfort in his overall polling advantage, while President Trump attacked what he called “fake polls” and insisted, “You don’t see the real poll numbers.”

The origins of this handy word go back to Germanic roots, with one early meaning having to do with the top part of the head of a person or animal. I remember as a boy that when we checked on our cattle, a head count was the first order of business. We also had a few cows with no horns, and they were sometimes referred to as “polled.”

The English “poll” is historically related to words found in Germanic languages, like “pol” in Dutch. As with the Dutch equivalent, “poll” early on could signify either the head or things that are metaphorically similar, like the top of a hill.

In Middle English, “poll” was often used to mean the scalp, where one’s hair grows. Shakespeare used it that way in “Hamlet,” when Ophelia sings a peculiar song about a dying man: “His beard was as white as snow, all flaxen was his poll.” 

Farmers used the word for the heads of their animals, and counting such livestock as horses, cattle, and sheep was done “by poll,” or by the head. That usage was extended to humans, so that “by poll” could refer to tabulating every person in a large group, much like the Latin equivalent, “per capita.”

A “poll tax” originally meant a tax levied across the board on every person. Only later did it get associated with payments for registering to vote, of the kind that disenfranchised Black voters in Southern states during the Jim Crow era.

Starting in the 17th century, “poll” as a noun and verb could be used not just for counting heads but for counting votes. Originally, “poll” was reserved for an official count of votes done in parliamentary settings when a show of hands or a voice vote was considered insufficient to decide whether a bill was passed.

The word’s meaning then evolved to refer to an election itself, or to locations where votes are cast—typically expressed in the plural form as “the polls.” That usage took off after the United States gained independence, as when Congress granted Washington, D.C. its first municipal charter in 1802 and specified how its residents could vote in city council elections: “The polls shall be kept open from eight o’clock in the morning till seven o’clock in the evening.”

It was only in the early 20th century that “poll” and “polling” started to be used for surveying public opinion, usually for the purpose of predicting how people will vote in an election. Unofficial “straw polls” began to be conducted by newspapers and magazines to gauge opinions, so called because straws could be used to see which way the wind blows. That gave way to more rigorous and scientific opinion polling, famously spearheaded by George Gallup, who accurately predicted the results of the 1936 presidential election between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alf Landon. The most prominent straw poll at the time, conducted by a magazine, the “Literary Digest,” predicted a landslide victory for Landon based on more than two million responses. But Gallup correctly chose Roosevelt by surveying a representative sample of about 50,000 voters. Obviously, subscribers to the “Literary Digest” were an elite group, not typical of most voters.

Gallup was given the unwieldy title of the “punditical pollster of public opinion” by “Time” magazine in 1939. Then the term “pollster” caught on as a label for election forecasters who analyze opinion polls. The word, which can have a disparaging tone, got popularized after the 1948 presidential election when Gallup and several fellow pollsters all thought that Harry S. Truman would be defeated by Thomas E. Dewey.

In 2016 Donald Trump’s victory was equally unexpected, and in 2020 he once again bet against the pollsters and their polls.

Jerry Lincecum is a retired Austin College professor who now teaches classes for older adults who want to write their life stories.  He welcomes your reminiscences on any subject: jlincecum@me.com