Word of the Day

Iftar “the meal that Muslims eat after sunset during Ramadan to break the day’s fast” is a borrowing of Arabic ʾifṭār “the breaking of the fast,” a verbal form of the noun ʾafṭara “to have breakfast, break a fast,” which is based on the same Arabic stem, fṭr, found in the holiday name Eid al-Fitr (from Arabic ʿīd al-fiṭr “festival of the breaking of the fast”). Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew base much of their vocabulary on three-consonant stems, and the Arabic stem fṭr (spelled fā, ṭā, rā) is cognate to the Hebrew stem pṭr (spelled pe, teth, resh), which is also found in Hebrew words relating to breaking, ending, or splitting. One example of this Hebrew stem is found in the word Haftarah, which is a portion of a text that was once recited at the conclusion of a Jewish liturgical service. Iftar was first recorded in the early 1830s.

Raillery “good-humored ridicule” is an adaptation of French raillerie, equivalent to the Middle French verb railler “to mock, deride” and the suffix -erie, which is used to indicate qualities, properties, or actions collectively. Railler derives by way of Occitan ralhar “to babble, chatter” from Late Latin ragere “to bray, bellow, roar.” The verb ragere is an example of Word of the Day hapax legomenon, which means “a word that only appears once in a particular work or area of literature”; in this case, ragere is included just one time in a Latin text that dates to the 10th century and is absent from all other texts in the Latin language. Ragere is likely of imitative origin, and although classical Latin had a similar-sounding synonym, rugīre “to roar” (compare French, Portuguese, and Spanish rugir), there is no connection between rugīre and ragere. Raillery was first recorded in English circa 1650.

Septentrion “the north” derives from Latin septentriōnēs, which refers to the seven stars of the asterism Big Dipper, part of the constellation Ursa Major (the “Greater Bear”). These seven stars, because of their location in the northern sky near the North Star, have long had an association with the north in various cultures; we only need to look at the state flag of Alaska to see this association alive and well today! Latin septentriōnēs is equivalent to septem “seven” and triō (stem triōn-) “plowing ox.” Another Latin word for “the north” is the noun boreās, the source of aurora borealis (literally, the “northern dawn”), which is a borrowing of Ancient Greek Boréās, the personification of the north wind. In modern Romance languages, instead of deriving from Latin septentriōnēs or boreās, the words for “north” (such as French nord and Spanish norte) are adapted from Old English north. Septentrion was first recorded in English in the late 14th century.

Abient “tending to move away from a stimulus or situation” comes from the Latin term abiēns (stem abient-) “going away,” the present participle of the verb abīre “to go away, exit, depart.” Abīre is formed from the preposition ab “from, away” and the verb īre “to go,” which has two stems: -ient and -it. The verb īre also gives rise to ambīre “to go around,” inīre “to go into, begin,” and trānsīre “to go across, cross,” and to see evidence of all these Latin verbs in English today, compare ambient and ambition, initial and initiate, and transient and transit. The -it stem also pops up in circuit (from Latin circumīre “to go round, circle”), exit (from exīre “to go out”), and even obituary (from obīre “to go toward,” often used euphemistically in the sense “to meet one’s death”). Abient was first recorded in English in the early 1930s.

Jornada “a full day's travel across a desert” is a loanword from Spanish, and prior to Spanish, the term derived via Occitan, a language once widely spoken in southern France, from a Vulgar Latin word akin to diurnāta “a day's time, day's work,” from Latin diurnus “daily.” Though some modern Romance languages derive their words for “day” from the Latin noun diēs “day” (compare Portuguese dia, Romanian zi, and Spanish día), others base their words for “day” on the adjective diurnus (compare French jour, Italian giorno, and Occitan jorn). Both diēs and diurnus come from the Proto-Indo-European root dyeu- “to shine; sky, heaven,” which is also the ultimate source of the recent Words of the Day toujours perdrix, circadian, and jovial. Jornada was first recorded in English in the 1650s.