Word of the Day

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.

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.