Word of the Day

Repentance ultimately derives via Old French from Latin paenitēre “to regret, be sorry.” Other derivatives of paenitēre include penance, penitence, and penitentiary. Although paenitēre is of uncertain origin, it was frequently confused with the similar-sounding noun poena “punishment, penalty,” a borrowing from Ancient Greek poinḗ. Poena is the source of numerous words related to crime and its consequences, such as subpoena, penalty, punish, punitive, and even pain; while these words are likely unrelated to repentance, they all share a p-vowel-n root and refer to the aftermath of a mistake or unfortunate choice. Repentance first appeared in English in the early 1300s.

Camion is a borrowing from French, but its ultimate origin is obscure. Hypotheses include a connection to Late Latin chamulcus “chariot, cart, machine” (from Ancient Greek) or to French chemin “way” (via Vulgar Latin cammīnus from Gaulish). While we normally associate Celtic languages with the British Isles, Gaulish is a long-extinct Celtic language once spoken in what is now France that proved heavily influential to Late Latin and Vulgar Latin, the ancestor of all Romance languages. Camion entered English in the late 1800s.

Testudinate derives from the Latin adjective testūdinātus, of the same meaning, from the noun testūdō “tortoise.” Testūdō, in turn, derives from testa “earthenware vessel; shard of baked clay; shell of a crustacean.” It is possible that testa comes from the Proto-Indo-European root ters- “dry,” which would make testa cognate to the words thirst (from Old English thurst “dryness”), terrain and terrestrial (from Latin terra “(dry) land”), and toast and torrid (from Latin torrēre “to burn”). In Late Latin, testa gained the additional sense of “skull” and developed into the word for “head” in several Romance languages (such as French tête and Italian testa). Testudinate entered English in the early 1700s.

Spelunk comes via Latin spēlunca from Ancient Greek spêlunx, one of several similar words for “cave” (along with spéos and spḗlaion) a term that is likely of Pre-Greek origin. While Ancient Greek is an Indo-European language and inherits its grammar and most of its vocabulary from Proto-Indo-European, Ancient Greek contains over a hundred words and names that linguists hypothesize to have once been loanwords from a pre-Greek substrate, a lost language spoken in the Aegean Sea prior to the arrival of the Greeks that influenced the development of Ancient Greek. Spelunk first entered English in the 20th century.

The archaic English verb yclept is the past participle of the equally archaic verb clepe “to call, name.” This initial y- derives from Old English ġe-, a prefix used to mark past participles; while ge- eventually fell out of use in English, many other Germanic languages, such as Dutch and German, still use ge- and similar prefixes to mark past participles. Even though ge- and y- are no longer used in English verbs, the prefixes have lived on in secret as the a- in words such as afford, aswoon, aware, and even dialectal ascared. Yclept was first recorded in the first millennium AD.