Word of the Day

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.

Feijoada “a dish of rice, black beans, and meat” is a borrowing from Brazilian Portuguese and a derivative of Portuguese feijão “bean.” Feijaõ, along with its cognates in other Iberian languages (e.g., Galician freixó and Spanish frijol), comes from Latin fasēlus, which refers to a legume such as the cowpea or the kidney bean. Fasēlus is itself an adaptation of Ancient Greek phásēlos, which linguists hypothesize derives from a Mediterranean substrate. As we learned from the recent Word of the Day spelunk, a substrate is a language that goes extinct once another language intrudes where it is spoken—but not before contributing substantial vocabulary to the intruding language. In this case, phásēlos was likely a word that existed in a now-lost language spoken thousands of years ago in what is now Greece before the Indo-Europeans migrated there from western Asia. Feijoada was first recorded in English in the early 1940s.

Frowzy “dirty and untidy” is of uncertain origin, but that knowledge gap has hardly stopped linguists from speculating. One possible connection is to dialectal British English frowsty “musty; ill-smelling” and frough “brittle, frail,” both of which are also of uncertain origin. However, any or all of these three terms may be related to Old English thróh “rancid; rancor,” which is itself, yet again, of uncertain origin. Unlike the standard or mainstream versions of a language, in which the roots of the majority of the vocabulary are easy to deduce, dialects often remain under-documented, and this causes historical mysteries such as the source of frowzy to emerge every once in a while. Frowzy was first recorded in English circa 1680.

Coronach “a song for the dead” is a borrowing from either Irish Gaelic coránach or Scottish Gaelic corranach, both meaning “dirge.” These two words are compounds of the prefix comh- “together” and Scottish Gaelic rànach “outcry.” If comh- looks a little familiar to you, there’s a good reason for that; comh- is cognate to Latin con- (also co-, col-, com-, cor-), also meaning “together, with.” Irish and Scottish Gaelic are both Celtic languages, which constitute a branch of the Indo-European family; Latin is also an Indo-European language, but it belongs to the Italic branch. As Indo-European languages, Irish and Scottish Gaelic are bound to share numerous cognates with Latin, but the high degree of similarity between the Celtic and Italic branches has prompted some linguists to propose an Italo-Celtic grouping within the Indo-European family. Coronach was first recorded in English in the 1490s.

Barchan “a crescent-shaped sand dune” is a borrowing by way of Russian barkhan from Kazakh barxan, of the same meaning. Kazakh is a member of the Turkic language family, which is found in large pockets from the eastern Mediterranean to central Siberia, as we learned about in the etymology for the recent Word of the Day yurt. Because most Turkic language-speaking countries today were once part of the former USSR, the Russian language has absorbed numerous loanwords from Turkic tongues, from Abkhaz and Azerbaijani in the west of Asia to Kazakh and Kyrgyz in the center. Barchan was first recorded in English in the late 1880s.