2701: Gardens, Orchards, and Paradise May 13, 2024
It’s lovely to sit in an orchard, though far less lovely sounding to sit in a wort-yard, yet this is what it would have been called in Old English ortgeard. 'Wort' in this case simply means ‘plant’, still seen at the end of many plant names, like butterwort, woundwort, and spearwort. However, etymologically speaking, there is an even better sounding orchard-word: paradise.
Paradise comes to English ultimately from the Avestan (Persian) word pairidaēza, meaning “enclosed garden” but in Ancient Greek παράδεισος (parádeisos) meant “palace gardens”. Because of this lofty definition, this word became associated with the Garden of Eden and by extension heaven (e.g. Dante’s Paradiso), displacing the enigmatic Old English word ‘neorxnawang’. These biblical connotations to ‘paradise’ do not exist in the doublet ‘parvis’ (i.e. “cathedral gardens”) but coincidentally came in the Hebrew פרדס (pardes) took on extra, spiritualism, while in Modern Hebrew still denotes an orchard.
2674: Meadow and Mow: How Spring & Sweetness are Related
The word 'mead' as in fermented honey, and a 'meadow' are related. There is an older form of meadow as 'mead' too such as in the Middle English poem "Sumer is Icumen in" that has the line
Groweþ sed (grows seed)
and bloweþ med (and the meadow blooms)
As it happens, both of those words ultimately are from the same root, but there are other words too like the Russian word for 'bear', медведь (medved), the word 'mow' in English, as well as the German 'Matte' (pasture) and Latin 'metere' (to harvest). The root in Proto-Indo-European related to growth, blossoming, and eventually sweetness. Many languages, especially of the ancient world, had related words meaning 'sweet wine', and eventually that came to mean 'drunk'. Even the name 'Maeve' comes from the same root as 'mead', from the Middle Irish 'medb' from the root meaning 'sweet' but in this case it means literally 'intoxicating'.
2632: free & friend Mar 2, 2022
Though it's doubtful anyone in the free-love movement would have been aware of it, the word 'free' used to convey a meaning of love. The Old English for 'free' (frēo) is from the Proto-Germanic *frijaz which meant both 'beloved' but also 'unbound', as in literally not enslaved. This is related to 'friend' as well, & in many languages like German, the word for 'friend' and 'lover' are the same one, here 'Freund'.
2629: obliterate Feb 26, 2022
The English words 'obliterate' and 'literature' come from the same root. Although 'obliterate' is thought of in a generic way meaning 'total destruction', in a more literal sense it means 'blotting out with ink'. It is for this reason that the French 'oblitération' can mean 'stamp; validate a ticket'. Beyond this the word becomes obscured because the history of the Latin 'littera' is not clear.
2612: iris Feb 8, 2022
The word 'iris' is the name for a flower as well as part of the eye. Both of these senses comes from the Ancient Greek ἶρις (îris) meaning 'rainbow', because this part of the eye deals with color, and the flower is named because it resembled the shape of the iris of the eye. More directly though, there is a Greek messenger deity who is both represented by the rainbow and gives certain significance to it, with some references using 'iris' to mean both messenger and rainbow. The root of this word means 'to twist' and is related to the English word 'wire', and the element iridium, which gives off many colors when dissolved.
2611: prune & plum Feb 7, 2022
There are a few cases where dried fruits have completely different names to the normal version, but this is pretty rare. Prunes for instance are dried plums, but this is just because the the Ancient Greek προῦνον (proûnon) means 'plum', likely borrowed from a native Anatolian language. The word 'plum' does not have a separate origin though, and merely stems from the Latin form 'prunum' which morphed over time into the English form. The Modern Greek word for a plum now is δαμάσκηνο (damaskino) meaning Damascus.
2596: crab, crib, & carve Jan 23, 2022
The word 'crab' is ultimately traced back to the Proto-Indo-European *gerbʰ- meaning 'to twist; to scratch; to claw', but so are 'carve', 'crib', and 'crèche'. Much of this has to do with leading to varied understanding, such as 'crab' and 'crayfish’ from Proto-Germanic *krabbô (to crawl) as opposed to 'crib' from Proto-Germanic *kribjǭ (wickerwork, basket) from the sense of twisting & weaving material. This led to a sense of 'clump; group' and then 'crèche' was born. 'Carve' is from the sense of this word as scratching, and is related to the Old Prussian gīrbin (number) from the idea of tallying.
2594: cancer & crabs Jan 21, 2022
Cancer is known to be related to crabs because of the zodiac symbol, but the relation is much deeper in fact. The word 'cancer', which now particularly associated with the disease, is because the enlarged veins around cancerous tumors were thought to look like the the legs of crabs. In Latin 'cancer' means 'crab', which itself is from Ancient Greek καρκίνος (karkínos) via metathesis. This is also where the word 'canker' is from, as well as 'chancre', both types of ulcers.
2587: felt, filter, anvil, and felon Jan 13, 2022
Filters can be made out of a plethora of materials and are used in all sorts of situations, but historically this would have been felt. This is why the Latin 'filtrium' and the English 'felt' came to be distantly related, but the material of felt has used to have a more generic meaning. The root *pel- meaning 'to beat' references this process of creating felts by crushing and rolling materials, and it is this same root that is found in 'anvil' and 'to fell' fairly sensibly, and 'felon' perhaps more surprisingly. This last word is from the same root but over time took on meanings of wickedness in certain languages like Latin before coming to English.
2580: compost Jan 6, 2022
Compost really should be called decompost. After all, the root 'compose' means 'to assemble; build up' and here it means exactly the opposite, insofar as it's decomposition. What might clarify things is the word 'compote', derived from a complicated arrangement of words and their associated meanings being borrowed back and forth between English and French meaning 'condiment'. In this sense, both related words describe a mixture of things into one, often amorphous creation.
2579: charm & oscine Jan 5, 2022
One might not think so by looking, but 'charm' and 'oscine' are related to each other. 'Oscine', which means 'related to a songbird', and while he prefix 'os-' is a mutation from 'ob-' (towards), the remaining '-cine/-cen' doesn't look that similar either. Both 'charm' [1] and 'obscen', here in its nominal form, are related to the Latin 'carmen' and come from the verb 'canere' (to sing). In Latin, '-cen' is tacked onto the ends of instruments as well to denote players thereof, such as 'lyricen' (lyrist) or 'tubicen' (tubaist; trumpetist).
2572: milk Dec 28, 2021
The English words 'milk' and 'lactose' obviously have related meanings, but moreover they share a common root. There is a clear set of relationships across Germanic languages for milky words like Milch (German), melk (Dutch/Afrikaans), as well as in Slavic languages молоко (moloko) in Russian, or mleko/mlijeko (Serbo-Croatian/Slovenian). Conversely, across Romance languages this is less clearly related with French 'lait', Spanish 'leche', and Italian 'latte' to the Ancient Greek γάλακτος (gálaktos) from γάλα (gála), but each of these comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root.
2569: Greek Re-Borrowing 'Cinema' Dec 25, 2021
While English has a number of regional words for movie theater, including 'cinema', and this word has permeated many other languages. Originally from Greek κίνημα (kínima) meaning 'movement' and the same root as 'kinetic' led to the German 'Kino' (from 'Kinematograph') via the French 'cinéma(tographe)'. This was the later reborrowed into Greek σινεμά (sinemá) with that same meaning.
2555: flee, fly, float Dec 11, 2021
The participial form of 'fly' is 'flight' while for 'flee' this would be 'fled'. This pair is, perhaps unsurprisingly, related, but they've long been each slightly different to the other. In Old English, these were 'flēogan' and 'flēon' respectively, but they shared a common root from the Proto-Germanic *fleuhaną. Originally this root meant 'flow', and naturally enough this is also related. From this it elucidates how this root also led to words like 'fleet' and 'float', or Old English 'flēot' (ship).
2546: glass (material) Dec 2, 2021
Recent posts discussed how the root *ghel- led to words for many different colors [1] or that related to light and bile, but even just looking at how 'glass' has changed can reveal a great deal of variability alone. From the 13th century it was used with restricted meanings beyond that just the material, in this case meaning 'drinking glass'. In the 14th century it took on the meaning of 'mirror' as in 'looking glass', and by the 15th century it referred to the timekeeping 'hour glass'.
2544: glass Nov 30, 2021
Although 'glass' refers to a material in English, throughout Indo-European languages the root of this word often led to other meanings for a variety of colors. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *ghel- meant 'shine' and as a result eventually came to mean 'glass' in Germanic languages, but also led to words for the colors yellow such as Old English 'glær' or Latin 'glaesum' (amber) or indeed Modern English 'yellow'. In Old Irish 'glass' meant 'green' and in Welsh 'glas' means 'blue'.
2514: calcium & calculus Oct 31, 2021
The words 'calcium' and 'calculus' are related by the common root of 'calx', or translated from Latin, 'limestone'. This makes a certain amount of sense for calcium, since this is an element and is found physically in limestone and even now is another term for kidney-stones, but the association to mathematics is not as clear. This is because the diminutive form of 'calx' took the suffix '-ulus', resulting in 'calculus' meaning 'pebble', which again doesn't seem to relate to math, but is a reference to the stones used as counters on an abacus. Before differential calculus took the more specific definition used today, 'calculus' could just mean 'to calculate', hence the relation there as well.
2465: piano Sep 11,
'Piano' means 'soft' in Italian, and this might seem strange on its own considering the power of the instrument, but it is shortened from 'pianoforte', literally 'soft-loud', named for the fact it could alternate volume more than its predecessors, harpsichords and clavichords. The word for 'piano' was borrowed, but words of that same root had been around for some time before. Both 'plane' and 'plain' are related to each other come from the sense of level, smooth, broad, even etc..
2452: New Latin Spellings: Things of the Past Aug 28, 2021
The words 'dinosaur' and 'deinonychus' both come from the same root, with the first element. The first part of 'dinosaur', coined in 1842, is from Ancient Greek δεινός (deinós) meaning 'terrible'. That said, it came to English through New Latin which has a standardized way of transliterating Greek into Latin letters, including going from Greek < ει > to Latin < ī >, and < ός > into < us >. Later, scientists stopped using (New) Latin as much—even though here it may technically be listed as being of New Latin—and even if they would, it was not with any real consistency: 'Utahraptor'. As a result, the word over 120 years later, 'deinonychus', uses <ei>.
2425: Cakes and Existing: wastel, victual, & gâteau Aug 11, 2021
The French cake 'gâteau' and the far more obscure English word 'wastel' also meaning 'cake' both happen then to be from a root meaning 'to be'. This relation between pastries and existing did not originate with desserts, but with the idea of sustenance. It was in this sense of general food that came out of the Proto-Indo-European *wes- (to be). In the interim period as well, the Old English 'wist' (to exist) and Latin 'victus' hence English 'victual' meaning 'food; sustenance' related also to 'vital' show that this process was not taken exactly at the same time around the world.