How to find the etymology of a word

Express the spirit of your words by exploring their origins

One of the most creative examples of wordplay I’ve ever seen came straight from some good dictionary research. The story: “The Big No,” Steven Wright’s Esquire piece about the suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.

How to find the etymology of a word — From anagrams to verbotomy, try these tools for coining words. *Image by aga7ta*

Here’s the kicker:

In Buddhist thought, to be alive is to be immersed in flame — the burning of the senses, the burning of the mind, the burning of desire. There is only one treatment for this painful condition we find ourselves in, this suffering life, and that is to extinguish the fire, to blow it out. From the Sanskrit nir, or out, plus vati, or it blows: nirvana.

The history of ideas is reflected in language. So if you aim to explain ideas, one way is to explain language. That’s why etymology — the study of word history* — is such an effective form of wordplay. Looking into the meanings behind and origins of your key words can give your copy depth and context.

How to write with etymology

In Demon in the Freezer, Richard Preston uses etymology to show the fascinating origins of the word vaccination:

In the late seventeen-hundreds, the English country doctor Edward Jenner noticed that dairymaids who had contracted cowpox from cows seemed to be protected from catching smallpox, and he thought he would do an experiment. Cowpox (it probably lives in rodents, and only occasionally infects cows) produced a mild disease. On May 14, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into the boy’s arm a droplet of cowpox pus that he’d taken from a blister on the hand of a dairy worker named Sarah Nelmes. A few months later, he scratched the boy’s arm with deadly pus he had taken from a smallpox patient, and the boy didn’t come down with smallpox. The boy had become immune. Jenner had discovered what he called vaccination, after the Latin word for cow.

Siddhartha Mukherjee packs The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer with etymological explanations like this one.

The names of ancient illnesses are condensed stories in their own right. Typhus, a stormy disease, with erratic, vaporous fevers, arose from the Greek tuphon, the father of winds — a word that also gives rise to the modern typhoon. Influenza emerged from the Latin influentia because medieval doctors imagined that the cyclical epidemics of flu were influenced by stars and planets revolving toward and away from the earth. Tuberculosis coagulated out of the Latin tuber, referring to the swollen lumps of glands that looked like small vegetables. Lymphatic tuberculosis, TB of the lymph glands, was called scrofula, from the Latin word for piglet, evoking the rather morbid image of a chain of swollen glands arranged in a line like a group of suckling pigs.

The late, great restaurant reviewer Charles Ferruzza described menu items so well that you felt like licking the newsprint. In one column, Ferruzza used etymological research to explain the origins of one entrée’s name:

A couple of visits to the four-month-old Caspian Bistro are a tasty lesson in history, geography and linguistics.

Linguistics? Well, if I hadn’t stuck my fork into a bowl of the slightly bitter beef-and-bean stew known as ghormeh sabzi … I never would have done a little homework on it. That’s how I discovered that ghormeh, the Farsi word for stew, spawned the more modern term gourmet.

That trivia note came from my copy of The Unofficial Guide to Ethnic Cuisine & Dining in America, which suggests that “unsophisticated French Crusaders’ adapted ghormeh to describe the lavish consumption of their Muslim enemies in the Holy Land.”

I don’t know if I’d call the Caspian Bistro a gourmet venue, but it’s definitely a ghormeh heaven …

And Andrew Graham-Dixon used etymology to add additional layers of meaning and context to these three passages from Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane:

The most serious penalty was reserved for Caravaggio. As well as being sentenced to indefinite exile from Rome, he was condemned as a murderer and made subject to a bando capitale, a capital sentence. This meant that anyone in the papal states had the right to kill him with impunity; indeed there was a bounty for anyone who did so. The phrase meant exactly what was indicated by the etymology of its second word, derived from the Latin caput. To claim the reward, it would not be necessary to produce the painter’s body. His severed head would suffice.