855: inevitable and unavoidable Apr 11, 2017

There are many words that are created by back-formation such as 'gruntled' from 'disgruntled', but plenty of words exist which have no positive form, such as 'inevitable'. This word was adopted into Middle English from the Latin 'inevitabilis' which is the negative form for 'evitabilis' (‘avoidable’). While 'unavoidable' is a synonym for this, it is not the case that one ultimately comes from Latin and the other from, say, Old English; both 'avoid' and 'inevitable' are Latinate, but 'avoid' came through Old French first. Moreover, 'avoid', originating from the Old French 'evuider', initially meant ‘clear out, get rid of’, relating more to the modern word 'void' (or 'vuide') meaning ‘empty’. This is related to the Latin 'vacare' (‘vacate’), and while in Middle English, 'avoid' could mean to empty something such as a trash it also denoted abandoning something. In this way, 'unavoidable' and likewise 'inevitable' referred to something that could not be abandoned. Though with 'avoid' now, the sense of emptying is obsolete, this meaning is still kept with the verb 'void', as in 'voiding one's bowels'.