Word of the Day

Bipartisan “representing members from two parties” is a compound of the combining form bi- “twice, two” and the adjective partisan “partial to a specific party.” Partisan comes by way of Middle French from dialectal northern Italian parteźan, which corresponds to standard Italian partigiano and is formed from the noun parte “faction, part” and the suffix -eźan (also -esano, -isano), an adjectival suffix that appears in standard Italian as -igiano. The element -igiano, which appears in nouns of occupation and adjectives of location, often becomes -esan or -isan in words borrowed into English by way of French; just as artisan derives from Italian artigiano, so does courtesan from Italian cortigiana, and for fans of Italian cuisine, this pattern explains how Italian parmigiano “from Parma” has become parmesan in English. Bipartisan was first recorded in English in the first decade of the 20th century.

Cordiform “in the shape of a heart” is a compound of two combining forms: cord- “heart” and -form “shape.” The stem cord- derives from Latin cor, of the same meaning, which is a distant cognate of English heart. As we learned in the etymologies of the recent Words of the Day corvine and pruinose, the Indo-European languages English and Latin share some predictable sound correspondences, and one of the best-known methods of predicting these correspondences is Grimm’s law. Named after the linguist and folklorist Jakob Grimm (of the Brothers Grimm and their fairy tales), Grimm’s law identifies a common pattern: the voiceless stops k (or c), p, and t in Latin and Ancient Greek frequently correspond to the voiceless fricatives h, f, and th in English. In addition to Latin cor and Ancient Greek kardía, which correspond to English heart, we can see this pattern in Latin pater and Ancient Greek patḗr vs. English father. Cordiform was first recorded in English in the 1750s.

Quoth “said,” despite the similar spelling, is not related to quote. While quote derives from Medieval Latin quotāre “to divide (into chapters or verses),” quoth is the past tense of the obsolete verb quethe, from Old English cwethan “to say.” The verb bequeath “to dispose of by last will” and the noun bequest “a disposition in a will” also stem from this Old English verb. Quoth has a few other cognates in modern Germanic languages, such as Icelandic kvetha “to say, chant,” but is otherwise isolated, with no other likely relatives in Ancient Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit. Quoth was first recorded in English in the late 12th century.

Awning “a rooflike shelter of canvas extending from a building to provide protection” is a relatively common word with a relatively uncommon history. Of obscure origin, several theories persist regarding its source. One is a derivation from Middle French auvans “sloping roof” (compare modern French auvent), also of obscure origin but sometimes connected to a Celtic source, which would have been reduced to the form awn and compounded with the suffix -ing. Another theory connects awning, because of its earliest use strictly in nautical contexts, to a Low German source cognate to English haven, with the sense of “shelter.” Awning was first recorded in English in the mid-1620s in the writings of Captain John Smith, whose name you may recognize for its association with the Jamestown colony in what is now Virginia.

The origin of conundrum “anything that puzzles” is itself a conundrum! Though it resembles Latin, conundrum likely belongs to the same family of pseudo-Latin terms as hocus-pocus. The earliest clue to conundrum’s origins is a 1645 text that connects the term to Oxford University and appears to define it as “pun, wordplay.” However, conundrum predates this instance by several decades, appearing in 1596 as a derogatory term for another person and later, in the 1620s, with the sense of “whimsical notion.” One suggestion, that conundrum is connected to the Latin verb cōnārī “to try, attempt,” with an intended meaning of “thing to be tried,” does not reflect conundrum’s earliest attested senses. As stated above, conundrum was first recorded in English in the 1590s.