2916: Mine and Mineral Dec 15, 2024

The words ‘mine’ and ‘mineral’ trace back to a common, Latin origin. This might not seem so surprising—they are semantically and phonetically quite similar—but unlike say ‘mine’ to ‘miner’ these do not have any morphological connection ‘mine’ → ‘miner’ → ‘mineral’. Rather, the word in Latin was ‘minera’ meaning ‘ore’ which in English became ‘minera’ + ‘-(a)l’, and now refers to anything naturally inorganic from the ground, not necessarily mined, while ‘mine’ comes from the Latin ‘mina’ of the same meaning.