Word of the Day

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.

Exclave “an outlying portion of a country entirely or mostly surrounded by the territory of another country” is modeled on the noun enclave, its opposite, using the Latin prefix ex- “out of, from.” Enclave comes from an older French term meaning “locked in,” from Latin clāvis “key,” which also gives rise to words such as clavicle, the collarbone, originally meaning “little key” in Latin, and conclave, a secret meeting, originally meaning “(room) with a key” in Latin. Exclave entered English in the late 1800s.

It’s easy to imagine how glitz is related to the word glitter, but the two words share a far deeper origin: the Proto-Indo-European root gʰel- “to shine.” This root crops up in at least a dozen brightness- and vision-related words, including glance, glare, glass, glaze, gleam, glimmer, glimpse, glint, glisten, glister, gloss, and glow, and is also the source of many light color names, such as gold and yellow in English and khlōrós “greenish-yellow” in Ancient Greek, from which chlorophyll is derived. Glitz entered English in the 1970s, which is surprisingly recent.

Cathartic comes via Latin from Ancient Greek kathartikós “fit for cleansing,” from the adjective katharós “pure” or “clean.” The name Catherine is often claimed to derive from katharós, but this is folk etymology; while the words look and sound similar, they have different, unrelated origins. A true derivative of katharós is the term Catharism, the name of a sect of Christianity that flourished in the south of France during the Middle Ages and held as one of its fundamental beliefs the existence of two equal, opposing gods rather than a single, all-powerful deity. Cathartic entered English in the early 1600s.