cove

Cove comes from Old English cofa, meaning 'chamber' or 'den,' tracing back through Proto-West Germanic *kobō to Proto-Germanic *kubô. A separate slang sense, meaning 'fellow,' entered English by 1570 from Romani kodo or kova, meaning 'this one' or 'that person.'

The word's survival owes something to luck: it sounds like the unrelated word 'cave,' which likely helped 'cove' stick around in the language even as its original sense of 'chamber' or 'den' narrowed toward the coastal inlet we know today.

It's cognate with Dutch koof, German Low German Koov, German Koben, and Icelandic kofi, all pointing to small enclosed spaces like nooks or huts.