2326: gymnasium #2 May 1, 2021

The word 'gymnasium' in English is usually refers to a place where exercise is done, and in German it is the name for a type of a lower school usually at a high academic standard, but in Greek γυμνός (gumnós) means 'naked'. Indeed this word belongs to a larger family of European words descended from the Proto-Indo-European root *nogw- meaning 'naked'. In Ancient Greece, it was a standard community feature to have an open-air area for sports, all done in the nude, but eventually this developed into a place of training the body and even the mind, hence the English and German senses.