Word of the Day

Juku “a school where students prepare for college entrance examinations” is a borrowing from Japanese. In its native language, juku means “private tutoring school” or “cram school” and is a term borrowed from Middle Chinese, in which it once meant “gate room.” Because juku is of Chinese origin, we can see the clear resemblance today between juku and Mandarin shú or Cantonese suk. Juku was first recorded in English in the early 1980s.

Cognoscenti “persons who have superior knowledge of a particular field” is the plural of cognoscente, which refers to an individual person with such knowledge. Unlike English, French, and Spanish, which usually add -s or -es to indicate a plural noun, Italian typically changes the final vowel of a word; singular -a often becomes plural -e, while singular -e and -o often become plural -i. The Italian verb meaning “to know” is conoscere, with the present participle conoscente, which lacks the g of cognoscente; the reason for the g is the influence of Latin cognōscere “to know.” Cognoscenti was first recorded in English in the 1770s.

Intramundane “existing within the material world” is based on intra- “within” and mundane “common, ordinary, of the earth.” Intra- comes from Latin intrā “within, inside” and is related to interior, internal, intestine, intimate, intrinsic, and introduce, all of which come from Latin terms involving movement toward or existence inside something. Mundane ultimately comes from Latin mundus; as we learned from the recent Word of the Day gens du monde, mundus originally meant “clean” before expanding to mean “elegant,” then “ornament,” and finally “the world.” A similar shift in meaning happened with the unrelated Ancient Greek word kósmos “order, government, universe,” as in cosmic and cosmopolitan. Intramundane was first recorded in English in the 1830s.

Muon “an unstable, positively charged subatomic particle” is a shortening of mu meson; beginning in the mid-20th century, scientists have used Greek letters to identify specific types of newly discovered subatomic particles, and the terms pion and tauon are formed similarly. The Greek letter mu, which is pronounced as “mee” in modern Greek and is the ancestor of the Roman letter m, is a borrowing from the Phoenicians, a seafaring people of the ancient Mediterranean. The Phoenician source is the letter mēm, a relative of the Hebrew letter mem, and both come from a Semitic root meaning “water.” Muon was first recorded in English in the early 1950s.

Brattice “a temporary wooden fortification” comes by way of Old French from Medieval Latin brittisca, which appears to be a Latin adaptation of Old English Bryttisc “British” because of the assumption that this type of fortification originated in Britain. The word British—as well as the related terms Breton, Britain, Brittany, and Brythonic—comes from a lost Celtic name that Greek writers recorded variously as Brettanoí and Prettanikḗ two millennia ago. An alternative proposal is that brattice is a compound of German Brett “board” and a common Romance element derived from Latin -iscus, which forms adjectives. Brattice was first recorded in English in the early 14th century.