Word of the Day

Pindan “semiarid country” is an adaptation of the word bindan in the Bardi language. Bardi is an endangered language spoken in Western Australia’s northern Kimberley region, which borders the Indian Ocean and the Timor Sea. Unlike most aboriginal languages of Australia, which belong to the Pama-Nyungan family (as we learned in the Word of the Day podcast about yakka), Bardi belongs to the Nyulnyulan family, all languages of which are spoken in the same area of what is now Western Australia. In North America, the Pacific coast hosts the most linguistic diversity, with over 20 unrelated Indigenous language families and language isolates spoken from Juneau to San Diego; in Australia, a similar phenomenon exists on the continent’s northern shore, which more than a dozen discrete language families call home. Pindan was first recorded in English in the early 1930s.

Sylvan “consisting of or abounding in woods or trees” derives from Latin sylvānus, a variant of silvānus “of or relating to the forest,” from silva “forest” and the adjectival suffix -ānus. Though silva is spelled with an i, sylvan and its relatives, such as the place names Pennsylvania and Transylvania as well as the given names Sylvester and Sylvia, contain the letter y. There are two reasons for this shift: Ancient Greek influence and the lack of spelling consistency during the Medieval Latin period. Ancient Greek contains two words for “wood”—hȳ́lē and xýlon—that bear a passing resemblance to Latin silva, and as the letters i and y became interchangeable in Latin during the Middle Ages, it was rather easy for the variant spelling sylva to emerge. Sylvan was first recorded in English circa 1560.

Bibliophile “a person who loves or collects books” is a compound of the combining forms biblio- “book” and -phile “lover.” The form biblio- is adapted from Ancient Greek biblíon “papyrus roll, strip of papyrus,” which is the namesake of Býblos, the Greek name for the Phoenician seaport of Gebal (or Gubal), where papyrus was once manufactured and exported. Byblos still exists today in modern Lebanon, albeit with the name Jbeil (standard Arabic Jubayl). One theory about the origin of the name Býblos is that it resulted from Ancient Greek traders’ misinterpretation of the name Gebal, but some linguists argue that these two names are unrelated and that Býblos is of pre-Greek origin. Though books have long been a primary mode for recording and transmitting information, the origin of the Ancient Greek word for “book” is uncertain—how ironic! Bibliophile was first recorded in English circa 1820.

Accelerando “gradually increasing in speed” is a borrowing from Italian, in which the word means “accelerating,” and derives from Latin accelerāre “to speed up.” In Italian, the suffixes -ando and -endo are used to mark gerunds, which are the form of a verb that is treated as a noun or an adverb. In English, we use -ing to mark gerunds in sentences such as “I like singing”; here, singing is still a verb, but it acts as though it is a noun (and the object of the verb like). Many words borrowed from Italian that end in -ando or -endo function as gerunds in the Italian language, from accelerando “accelerating” to crescendo “growing.” These gerund endings appear as well in terms from other Romance languages such as glissando “sliding” (which is based on the French verb glisser “to slide”) and innuendo “signaling” (from Latin innuere “to signal”). Accelerando was first recorded in English circa 1840.

Metronymic “derived from the name of a mother” is an adaptation of the Ancient Greek term mētrōnymikós “named after one's mother,” which is equivalent to mḗtēr (stem mētr-) “mother” and -ōnymos “having the kind of name specified,” plus the adjectival suffix -ikos. A common variant of metronymic is matronymic, and because both terms are widely accepted, the decision of which to use is yours to make. Do you preserve the original Ancient Greek stem metr-, or do you opt for its more popular Latin cognate stem, matr-? The male equivalent of metronymic (and matronymic), meaning “derived from the name of a father,” is patronymic. Because the Ancient Greek and Latin stems meaning “father” are both patr-, however, patronymic is the only option for paternal namesakes. Metronymic was first recorded in English in the late 1860s.