Word of the Day

Spendthrift “a person who spends wastefully” is a compound of the verb spend and the noun thrift. Spend has been in the English language for well over 1000 years, but it is in fact of Latin origin; while most English words derived from Latin entered following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, there are a select few that spread from Latin long beforehand and took root in West Germanic languages such as English and German. In this case, spend derives from Latin expendere “to weigh out, lay out, pay,” a compound of the prefix ex- “out of, from” and the verb pendere “to hang.” Thrift, in contrast, derives from Old Norse, in which the word means “well-being” or “prosperity,” and is related to the verb thrive. This “prosperity” sense is obsolete, of course; thrift shifted in definition during the 16th century to mean “savings,” and from there, it adopted its current meaning of “economy” and “spending little money.” Spendthrift was first recorded in English at the turn of the 17th century.

Repast “meal” derives via Middle English from the Old French verb repaistre “to eat a meal” (compare Modern French repaître “to feed, to eat”), which ultimately comes from the Latin prefix re- “again, regularly” and the verb pāscere “to feed.” Pāscere, the past participle stem of which is pāst-, is the source of numerous food- and livestock-related terms in English, such as antipasto and pasture. Despite the similar spelling, the words past and pasta are not derivatives of pāscere. Past was originally a variant of passed, the past participle of pass, a verb that comes from the Latin noun passus “step,” while pasta is an Italian borrowing from Ancient Greek pastá “barley porridge.” Repast was first recorded in English in the early 1300s.

Hominid “a member of the family consisting of humans and great apes” is adapted from New Latin Hominidae, the name for this family, from Latin homō (stem homin-) “man, human being.” As we learned with recent Word of the Day chernozem, homõ derives from the Proto-Indo-European root dhghem- “earth,” which is the source of person-related terms such as Latin hūmānus (compare human) and Old English guma “man” (compare bridegroom) as well as land-related words such as Latin humus “earth,” Ancient Greek khthōn “earth” (compare chthonian), and Ancient Greek chamaí “on the ground” (compare chameleon, literally “ground lion”). Hominid was first recorded in English in the late 1880s.

Asterism “a group of stars” derives from Ancient Greek asterismós “a marking with stars,” from astḗr “star.” Astḗr comes from the Proto-Indo-European root ster-, of the same meaning, which is also the source of English star and Latin stella. For the latter, compare constellation “any of various groups of stars to which definite names have been given,” which is often conflated with asterism, but the two share a slight distinction. An asterism is a group of stars, while a constellation is the named shape that multiple asterisms form. For example, the Big Dipper is an asterism comprising seven stars, but Ursa Major is the constellation that contains the Big Dipper as well as several other asterisms. Asterism was first recorded in English in the 1590s.

Persnickety “overparticular, fussy” is a variant of pernickety, a Scottish English word of uncertain origin. Per- is a common prefix in expressive words in the Scots language, such as perjink “exact, neat, trim,” perskeet “fastidious,” and perjinkity “exact detail,” all of which are similar in meaning to persnickety. One hypothesis is that persnickety and pernickety are compounds of this prefix per- and the noun nick “small notch, hollow place” or a diminutive of nick such as nickett. Alternatively, persnickety could be related to the adjective snickety, also meaning “fussy,” or to the noun snicket “passageway between walls or fences,” but the connection is unclear. The final theory is that persnickety and pernickety are heavily corrupted variants or fusions of particular “exceptionally selective” and finicky “excessively fastidious.” Persnickety was first recorded in English in the late 1880s.