sconce: Effectively, English now only has one word sconce in general use, although others have come and gone in the past. That is the noun meaning ‘candlestick’ or ‘wall bracket for a light’ [14]. It originally denoted a ‘lantern’ or ‘covered candlestick’, and came via Old French esconse from medieval Latin absconsa. This was short for laterna absconsa, literally ‘hidden lantern’; absconsa was the feminine past participle of Latin abscondere ‘hide’ (source of English abscond [16]), a compound verb formed from the prefix ab- ‘away’ and condere ‘put, stow’.
It may be that sconce ‘lantern, lamp’ lay behind the now obsolete slang sconce ‘head’ [16], and there are grounds for believing that this in turn inspired the old university slang term sconce ‘penalty of drinking a large amount of beer for a breach of the rules’ [17] (the underlying notion being of a poll tax or ‘head’ tax). A fourth sconce, now altogether defunct, was a military term for a ‘small fort’ [16].
This was borrowed from Dutch schans, which came via Middle High German schanze from Italian scanso ‘defence’. This in turn was a derivative of the verb scansare ‘turn aside, ward off’, which was descended from Vulgar Latin *excampsāre, a compound verb formed from the prefix ex- ‘out’ and campsāre ‘turn round, sail by’. A memory of the word survives in English, however, in the derived verb ensconce [16] (etymologically ‘hide behind a fortification’). => abscond; ensconce
late 14c., "candlestick with a screen," a shortening of Old French esconse "lantern, hiding place," from Medieval Latin sconsa, from Latin absconsa, fem. past participle of abscondere "to hide" (see abscond). Meaning "metal bracket-candlestick fastened to a wall" is recorded from mid-15c.
