cofa

Cofa in Old English meant a chamber, a room, or a recess. It is related to the Old Norse kofi (a hut or shed) and probably to the Proto-Germanic *kubô (a hollow). The architectural meaning came first: a cove was a concave surface, especially the curved junction between a wall and a ceiling. Plasterers still call this a cove molding. The word was about interior spaces before it ever went outdoors.

By the 1580s, English had transferred the word to geography. A cove was a small, sheltered bay — an indentation in the coastline that curves inward like a room. The architectural metaphor is exact: a cove on a ceiling curves inward from the flat surface, and a cove on a coast curves inward from the shoreline. The shape is the same. The scale is different.

Coves became associated with smugglers and pirates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The sheltered, hidden nature of a cove — small enough to be overlooked, protected enough to anchor in — made them ideal for clandestine landings. The Cornwall and Devon coasts of England are dotted with coves that have smuggling histories. Lulworth Cove, Kynance Cove, Polperro — each has its stories of brandy barrels and revenue officers.

The word 'cove' also developed a completely separate slang meaning in British English: a man, a fellow. This is probably from Romani kova (that man, that thing), unrelated to the coastal word. The two meanings coexist without confusion because context does all the work. Nobody has ever been uncertain whether 'cove' means a bay or a bloke.