1. The word entered English in the late fourteenth century as a technical term of logic. John Wyclif, the Oxford theologian who produced the first complete translation of the Bible into English, used it in one of his English writings, composed before 1382 and surviving in a manuscript copied around 1425. Wyclif was condemned as a heretic, and his body was exhumed and burned more than forty years after his death. He used it for the ten classes into which Aristotle had divided everything that exists, Substance, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position, State, Action and Passion. Wyclif wrote that fools must first learn them, and only then might they see their own folly. Behind the English lay French, and behind French lay a Latin word built to carry Greek.

2. Latin coined it in the fourth century for a single purpose, to translate one Greek word, kategoria, the term Aristotle had used for his ten classes. Augustine, the North African bishop whose Confessions became one of the most read books of the ancient world, used it around 400 AD in a different sense, a statement about what was to come. By the ninth century it could also mean a sermon. Old French took the Aristotle sense by the mid thirteenth century, and from French it passed into English. John Capgrave, an English friar writing around 1450, noted that Aristotle's own Greek title had by his day given way to the Latin word.

3. Behind the Latin word lay a verb, praedicāre, meaning 'to proclaim or declare publicly', built from two parts. The first was prae-, meaning 'forth' or 'before'. The second was dicāre, meaning 'to proclaim', the twin of dicere, meaning 'to say', two Latin verbs so close that scholars believe they began as one word. Behind both lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *deik-, meaning 'to show', and also 'to pronounce solemnly'. Sanskrit dic- means 'to point out', Greek deiknynai means 'to show or prove', and the same root gave Latin digitus, the finger, the thing that points. In Old English it became tæcan, the ancestor of teach.

4. PREACH and DICTIONARY share the same ancient root. PREACH came from the same Latin verb, praedicāre, and English borrowed it twice, first from Church Latin in the Old English period, then again in the twelfth century from Old French. A sermon and this word are, at their root, the same act of public declaration. DICTIONARY came from the twin verb dicere, through dictio, 'a saying', which in later Latin came to mean simply 'a word', and the Medieval Latin dictionarium, a book of words, is said to have been used first by John of Garland, an English scholar in Paris, as the title of a Latin vocabulary around 1220.

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1. The word entered English in the 1570s from French, itself drawn from Latin. It had appeared in Anglo-Norman as early as the second half of the fourteenth century, already carrying the sense of noble birth. Its earliest English sense described a fortune of birth rather than a quality of character. Edward Hellowes, a groom of the Chamber to Queen Elizabeth I, used it in 1574 in his translation of the Familiar Epistles of Antonio de Guevara, the Spanish bishop and court chronicler. Behind the English lay French, and behind French lay Latin.

2. French carried it into English, drawing on a Latin root already established in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Among the Anglo-Norman nobility in England it had been in use since the late fourteenth century, naming the accident of birth that separated an aristocrat from a commoner. Shakespeare used it in Hamlet, written around 1600, applying it to Hamlet himself, whose noble-minded openness Claudius exploited, knowing a man of such birth and breeding would never suspect treachery in a fencing match.

3. Behind the Latin adjective lay the noun genus, meaning 'race, stock and kind', the word Romans used for the lineage that defined a family's place in the world. Virgil built the entire argument of the Aeneid, c.19 BC, his epic poem about the founding of Rome, on it, tracing the bloodline of his hero from the gods of Troy to justify Rome's claim to rule the ancient world. Behind genus lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *gene-, meaning 'to give birth or beget'. Sanskrit janati means 'to bear a child', and Greek built gignesthai from the same root, meaning 'to come into being'. The same root gave Latin gignere, meaning 'to father a child', and reached Old English as the ancestor of the word for a king.

4. GENIUS and GENTLE share the same Latin root. GENIUS came from Latin genius, the divine spirit Romans believed a father passed to his children at birth, the procreative force that ran through a family's blood. GENTLE came from Latin gentilis, meaning 'of the same clan or race', and entered English around 1200 describing the well-born and noble, and now names a quality of character available to anyone.

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1. The word entered English in 1651, in Gondibert, an unfinished verse epic by Sir William Davenant, poet laureate and theatre manager, written while he was imprisoned by the Parliamentary government in the Tower of London, awaiting trial for high treason after the execution of Charles I. John Milton, who would later write Paradise Lost, was then serving as its Latin Secretary and intervened to secure his release. Davenant used the word for the hidden schemes and plots of men who could not be trusted. Behind the English lay a French verb, and behind that an Italian one, and behind both lay Latin. The man who introduced it to English is buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

2. Latin carried it into Italian, and Italian carried it into French, before it reached English in the seventeenth century. In Italy the word entered the language of the theatre, where commedia dell'arte, Italy's improvised comic theatre, popular from the sixteenth century, built its plots around deception and scheming. It had appeared in English once before, in the late fourteenth century, borrowed from Old French or directly from the Latin, but failed to establish itself. Samuel Pepys, the naval administrator whose diaries are among the most vivid accounts of seventeenth century London, used it in the 1660s to capture the clandestine love affairs of the court of Charles II.

3. Behind the Latin verb lay two older parts, a prefix and a noun. The first was in-, the Latin prefix meaning ‘into’. The second was tricae, a Latin plural noun meaning perplexities, hindrances, trifles and tricks. Cicero, the Roman statesman and orator who died in 43 BC, used it in his letters to describe the petty obstacles and distractions that get in the way of serious matters. Its own origin is disputed, with theories ranging from a PIE root meaning ‘to turn’ to connections with the ancient languages of Central Asia, neither of which has been confirmed.

4. TRICK and EXTRICATE share the same Latin root as this word. TRICK came into English from the Norman dialect of Old French in the early fifteenth century, probably from the same Latin root, though the precise connection is disputed. EXTRICATE came from Latin extricāre, built from the same root with a prefix meaning 'out of', naming the act of disentangling someone from a difficult situation. It is the word we reach for when someone needs rescuing from an awkward conversation or a bad decision.

5. For its first half century in English the word named deception and secret plotting. Aphra Behn, the playwright and spy who became the first professional woman writer in English, used it in 1679 in The Feign'd Curtizans, a comedy set in Rome where disguise and mistaken identity drive every scene. The plotting sense was established by 1714. The modern sense, to excite curiosity or fascination, did not arrive until 1894. The Oxford English Dictionary called it a modern gallicism, an English word that had taken on the French meaning.

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1. The word entered English in 1668, in a work by Bishop John Wilkins, a founder of the Royal Society, brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell, and later Bishop of Chester. His Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language was an attempt to create a universal language understood across all nations, classifying all known creatures and concepts, and he used the word to describe animals that move and feed together rather than alone. Behind the English lay Latin, and behind Latin lay a single noun for a herd or a flock.

2. It entered English directly from Latin, with an English suffix added to the Latin stem. John Ray, the naturalist who laid the foundations of modern taxonomy, used it in 1678 in his translation of The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, describing starlings as birds that live and fly together in great flocks. Varro, the Roman scholar whose Rerum Rusticarum, published around 37 BC, was one of the ancient world's most thorough accounts of farming and animal husbandry, used the Latin form to describe animals that gathered and moved as one.

3. Behind the Latin noun lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *ger-, meaning to gather. The same root gave Greek agora, the open space at the heart of every ancient Greek city where citizens gathered to trade and debate, and probably gave Sanskrit grāmaḥ, meaning a collection of people. From that same root came the Latin grex, the word for a herd of animals or a flock of birds.

4. EGREGIOUS and CONGREGATE share the same Latin root as this word. EGREGIOUS came from Latin egregius, built from the word for a flock with a prefix meaning out of, naming someone who stood out from the herd. By the seventeenth century the word had reversed entirely, and now names something that is outstandingly bad. CONGREGATE came from the same Latin root with a prefix meaning together, and gave English both the verb for assembling and the noun for the people who fill a church.

5. For its first century in English the word belonged entirely to the natural world. Oliver Goldsmith, whose History of Earth of 1774 was one of the most widely read works of natural history of the eighteenth century, used it to describe the behaviour shared by all creatures that move in groups. The word's shift to being applied to humans started in 1789, when Hester Lynch Piozzi, the writer and diarist who had been a close friend of Samuel Johnson, used it in her Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany to describe the pull of company that she felt wherever she travelled. In 1855 Charles Dickens used it in a letter, writing of the effect that a shared excitement produces in a crowd.

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1. The word entered English in the late thirteenth century from Old French, itself drawn from Latin. The Latin form named an allowance given to Roman soldiers, money set aside for them to buy a commodity. Pliny the Elder, the Roman author and natural philosopher who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, discussed the practice in his Natural History, a 37-volume encyclopaedia of the ancient world. Behind the Latin noun lay a single word, one of the most traded commodities in the ancient world.

2. Latin carried it into Old French, and Old French brought it to English by the late thirteenth century. The Latin form had been in use for centuries before that, part of the daily provision given to soldiers across the Roman Empire. The road along which the commodity was transported was one of the oldest trade routes in Italy, running from Rome to the Adriatic coast. The word had taken root in the three other Romance languages, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, before it crossed into French.

3. Behind the Latin noun lay a single word, sal, meaning 'salt', from a Proto-Indo-European root *sal- also meaning 'salt'. The same root gave Greek háls, Welsh halen, Old Irish salann, Latvian sāls and Armenian al. Tocharian sāle, the language of an ancient people whose manuscripts were found in western China, carried the same root to the eastern edge of the Indo-European world. Each carried the word, and one of the ancient world's most precious commodities, across thousands of years and miles.

4. SAUCE and SAUSAGE share the same ancient root. SAUCE entered English from Old French in the thirteenth century, from Latin salsus meaning 'salted', and has named the condiment ever since. SAUSAGE came through Old Northern French, the Norman dialect carried to England after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, from Latin salsīcia, meaning meat prepared by salting.

5. For most of its English life the word named any payment for any service. By the nineteenth century it had narrowed to its modern sense. Salt never lost its political power. In 1286 the French crown enacted the gabelle, a salt tax so resented it became one of the causes of the French Revolution. In 1930 Mahatma Gandhi walked 240 miles to the sea to make salt, defying the British salt tax in one of the defining acts of the Indian independence movement.

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1. The word's origin is Old English, a compound of two existing words. Its earliest recorded use appears in Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, a sermon by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, who wrote under the pen name the Wolf, composed around 1014 as a call to repentance at a time when Viking raids had driven King Ethelred into exile. It named a person who had a spiritual affinity with another by acting as a sponsor at a baptism.

2. Formed within Old English rather than borrowed from another language, it drew on a Proto-Germanic root already in the language before the Norman Conquest of 1066. The same root ran through Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old High German and Gothic, each language carrying its own form of the same idea of kinship and belonging. Robert Mannyng, a Lincolnshire monk, used the compound in Handlyng Synne around 1303, still in its original sense of a spiritual bond between families at a christening.

3. Behind the compound lay two older words. The first came from Proto-Germanic *guthan, from a PIE root *ghut- meaning 'that which is invoked', the being called upon in ritual and prayer. The second came from a Proto-Indo-European root *swe- meaning 'self' or 'one's own', naming those who shared the same blood. Together they named a bond between people created not by birth but by the promises made at a christening.

4. GODMOTHER and SIBLING share their roots with the two halves of this compound. GODMOTHER shares the first element, naming the woman who stood as spiritual sponsor at a christening and pledged to guide the child in the Christian faith. SIBLING shares the second element, the Old English word for a blood relative, reintroduced into modern English by the geneticist Karl Pearson in 1900 when he needed a word for a brother or sister of either sex.

5. By the fourteenth century it had begun to drift. William Langland used it in Piers Plowman around 1390 to describe a familiar friend or neighbour. By 1600 Shakespeare used it in A Midsummer Night's Dream for women friends who gathered at a birth. In 1716 Joseph Addison used it in The Freeholder, his twice-weekly periodical on politics and manners, for a person of light and trifling character who neglected serious matters for idle talk. Washington Irving, the American author of Rip Van Winkle, completed the word's journey in The Sketch Book in 1820, using it to describe the idle talk itself rather than the person who spoke it.

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1. The word entered English in 1551. Its earliest recorded use appears in Castle of Knowledge, a book on astronomy by the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who used the word to describe a circle that did not share its centre with another.

2. It came into English from Middle French, itself borrowed from Medieval Latin. Behind both lay a Greek compound. Greek astronomers had used it to describe orbits that deviated from a perfect circle. Ptolemy was an astronomer who worked in Alexandria, Egypt, in the second century AD, and whose model of the universe placed the Earth at its centre. For over a thousand years, European scholars used his model, and carried the word through Latin into French, Italian, and Spanish before it crossed into English. Robert Burton used it in Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621, in his account of the Ptolemaic model of the heavens.

3. Behind the Greek compound lay two older words. The first was ek, a preposition meaning 'out of'. The second was kentron, meaning 'centre', from the Greek verb kentein, from a Proto-Indo-European root *kent- meaning to prick or stitch. It named the sharp point of a compass pressed into a surface to hold it steady while the circle was drawn around it. The centre of a circle was named after the instrument that marked it.

4. CENTRIFUGAL and CONCENTRATE share the same ancient root. CENTRIFUGAL entered English in the seventeenth century from Latin, combining the root for centre with fugere, meaning to flee, naming the force that drives things outward from the middle. CONCENTRATE came from the same Latin root, naming the act of drawing everything inward toward a single point. Both words share the same Greek root as this one, the sharp compass point that marks the centre.

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1. The word entered English in 1940. Its first recorded use appears in a syndicated newspaper column by the American novelist Katharine Brush, who noted that radio broadcasters had two words for an on-air mistake. A small one they called a fluff. A bad one they called by this word. Behind the English lay Yiddish and German, though the precise route is uncertain.

2. Possibly from Yiddish, itself drawing on German, though the precise route into American English remains disputed. The connection was noted as early as 1959, in Sponsor, a trade magazine for television and radio advertisers, which observed that the word probably came from a German or Yiddish word meaning to slip. From radio broadcasting it crossed into television engineering in the early 1950s, where it named a sudden interference in the picture signal.

3. Behind both languages lay a Proto-Germanic root, *glīdan, meaning to glide or slip. It named the sensation of smooth, unresisted movement across a surface. The same root gave Old English its word for gliding, recorded in Beowulf describing a ship moving across the open sea. It also gave Dutch glissen and the Frankish word that passed into French as glisser, meaning to slide.

4. GLIDE and GLISSADE share the same ancient root. GLIDE came directly into Old English from the Proto-Germanic root for slipping and gliding, and has been in the language since Beowulf. GLISSADE reached English in the nineteenth century from French, where the same root had travelled through the early Germanic settlers of northern France, naming first a sliding step in ballet and later a controlled descent down a snow slope.

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1. The word entered English in the mid-fifteenth century, formed from two existing English words. Its earliest recorded use as a single compound word appears in 1591, in Arte of Warre, a military manual written by an English soldier who had served in the Low Countries during the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule in the 1560s and 1570s. It named a narrow vertical slit cut into a castle wall. Behind one of its two elements lay a Middle Dutch word meaning to watch or peer.

2. One element came from Middle Dutch into Middle English, the other was already rooted in Old English. The Middle Dutch watching word had entered Middle English by the late fourteenth century. William Langland used it in Piers Plowman, his long allegorical poem about the search for Christian salvation, where the devils rush to block up the slits in the walls of hell to stop the light of heaven breaking through. The second element meant a hollow or cavity, recorded in Old English by the ninth century.

3. Behind the Old English element lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *kel-, meaning to cover or conceal. From that root came the Old English verb meaning to cover or hide, and the noun naming a hollow space, a place where something might be out of sight. Behind the Middle Dutch element lay a Germanic root for watching without being seen, surviving in glupen in German meaning to look at slyly, and gluipen in Dutch meaning to sneak.

4. HELL and HULL share the same ancient root as the second element of this compound. HELL came from Old English hel, named for the concealment of the dead beneath the earth, recorded in English by the ninth century. HULL came from Old English hulu, the outer casing of a seed or ship, the covering that keeps what is inside out of sight. Both descend from the same Proto-Indo-European root meaning to cover or conceal.

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1. The word entered English from Old French in the early fifteenth century. Its earliest recorded use appears in a translation of a French allegorical poem by John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk at Bury St Edmunds, completed around 1426. Lydgate used it to describe the shadow falling across a face. Behind the Old French lay Latin, and behind Latin lay a root meaning shade and shadow.

2. It travelled from Latin into Old French, and from Old French into English. The Latin root was the word Roman poets reached for when describing shadow and shade. Virgil used it in the Aeneid for the ghosts of the dead, the shades that drifted through the underworld. The Old French form named the shade cast by trees, the kind of cool darkness a traveller might rest under on a summer road. Milton used it in Paradise Lost in 1667, describing woods so dense no light could reach the ground beneath them.

3. Behind the Latin lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *andho-, meaning 'blind and dark'. It named the condition of being unable to see, of moving through the world without sight. The same root gave Sanskrit andha- and Avestan anda-, both meaning 'blind or dark', in texts composed around 1500 BC. From that ancient root came the Latin word for shadow, the darkness that falls across a surface and briefly takes the light away.

4. UMBRELLA and PENUMBRA share the same Latin root. UMBRELLA came into English in the early seventeenth century from Italian, where ombrella named a portable shade carried against the sun, literally a little shadow. PENUMBRA came from Latin paene, meaning 'almost', combined with the same root for shadow, naming the half-shadow at the edge of an eclipse where the light is not fully blocked.

5. Shakespeare used the word in Hamlet in 1604, in its older sense to describe a shadowy semblance, an outline of a person rather than the person themselves. By the 1620s it had acquired a new sense in the language of diplomacy and court politics, naming the feeling of displeasure felt by a person who believed they had been slighted or overlooked. William Temple, the English diplomat and essayist, used the phrase in 1683, writing of allies who had taken great offence at his journey to The Hague. Today it retains a faintly archaic dignity that can lend a humorous flair to casual conversation.

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1. The word entered English around 1300, carried across from Old French. Behind the French lay a Greek compound built from two roots, one naming a colour, the other naming a fluid the body produced.

2. It travelled from Greek into Latin, and from Latin into Old French, before reaching English around 1300. The Greek form had been in use since at least the fifth century BC, when physicians traced the disorders of the mind to the balance of fluids in the body. That understanding reached England through medical writing. Chaucer used the word in the 1380s, in the Nun's Priest's Tale, to describe an unsettled night's sleep.

3. Behind the Greek compound lay two older words. The first was melas, meaning 'black', from a Proto-Indo-European root *mel- meaning 'of darkish colour'. The second was khole, meaning 'bile', the bitter fluid the body produces in the liver, from a Proto-Indo-European root *ghel- meaning 'to shine or gleam'. Ancient physicians believed the body contained four such fluids, each governing a temperament, and that an excess of bile, in its blackened form, settled in the spleen and cast darkness over the mind.

4. CHOLERA and GALL share the same root as one element of this compound. CHOLERA came into English from Greek kholera, the name ancient physicians gave to a violent disorder they attributed to an excess of bile. GALL was the Old English word for bile itself, and survives today in the sense of brazen impudence, the bile of behaviour rather than the body.

5. Aristotle's school argued that all men of genius were touched by this temperament. Robert Burton devoted over a thousand pages to the subject in 1621, producing one of the most widely read books of the seventeenth century. John Keats, in 1819, argued in verse that its truest shrine was found not in despair but in the fleeting beauty of the world. By the early nineteenth century the word was no longer used only as a medical term. It had become a mark of depth, sensitivity, and creative intelligence. Today it is also used to describe the feeling caused by overwhelming flow of digital information.

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1. The word entered English in the first half of the fourteenth century. Its earliest recorded use appears in a chronicle of England written in rhyming verse by Robert Mannyng, a Lincolnshire monk, completed around 1338. He used it to mean reckoning, in his case counting out the year of a king's accession. Behind the English lay French and Latin, and behind both lay the Latin word for weight.

2. It arrived in English twice, from Middle French and directly from Latin. The Latin verb meant to weigh and to weigh up, and was built on the noun for weight. In French it was first recorded in the 1350s, in a translation of Livy, the historian of Rome. The same Latin word had reached English once before. Centuries earlier, Old English borrowed from it a rare word for a scholar.

3. Behind the Latin lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *(s)pen-, meaning to stretch and to spin. It named the drawing out of a thread. From it came a Latin verb meaning to hang and to weigh, which in the Roman world were one action. From that verb came the noun for weight, and from weight came the verb behind this word.

4. POUND and SPEND share the same ancient root. POUND came from a Latin phrase meaning a pound by weight. Germanic tribes borrowed it from Roman traders on the continent, and the Anglo-Saxons carried it to Britain in the fifth century. SPEND came from a Latin verb meaning to weigh out money.

5. In 1553 King Edward VI needed to raise money, and his commissioners were moving through England's parishes, listing church treasures to be seized by the crown. In the city of York, a clerk reached for this word to record a silver chalice weighing four ounces. A century later, in Paradise Lost, John Milton used the word when describing God hanging his golden scales in heaven to weigh the outcome of a threatened fight between Satan, caught in the Garden of Eden, and the angel Gabriel. Satan looked up, saw his scale fly upward, and fled. Then in the nineteenth century the physical sense of weighing was dropped, leaving only the sense of weighing something mentally.

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1. The word entered English in the early 1570s. Thomas Twyne, a Sussex physician and translator, used it in 1573 in his English translation of a Welsh scholar’s description of Britain. He applied it to the special character of the British tongue. Behind the English lay French and Latin, and behind both lay a Greek word for something privately owned.

2. It travelled through three languages before English. In Greek a verb meaning to make one's own was built from an adjective. From that verb came a noun naming a personal peculiarity. Latin borrowed the noun, and over the centuries its sense widened from a personal phrase to a whole language. By 1544 it had settled into French. Thirty years later it crossed into English, with some writers borrowing directly from the Latin as well.

3. The Greek root was an adjective meaning private. In the Athens of the fifth century BC it marked the boundary between a person’s affairs and the shared life of the city. From it the Greeks built a verb meaning to make something one’s own, and from that verb a noun for a peculiarity belonging to one person, such as a private habit of speech.

4. DIALECT and RHETORIC both came from Greek words for speaking. DIALECT from a Greek verb meaning to converse, the shared speech of a community. RHETORIC from the Greek word for a public speaker, the art of addressing the assembly. This word belonged to the more private sense of speech.

5. For more than half a century the word named the character of a whole language. John Donne, English poet and, from 1621, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London, found something smaller in it, certain forms of speech that scripture repeats. From that narrower sense came the modern one. In 2004 the French former IBM executive Jean-Paul Nerrière created Globish, a stripped-down English of 1,500 words for international business. By 2008 New Scientist was reporting his advice to native speakers, to speak in simple sentences and avoid exactly what this word names.

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1. The word entered English from Old French in the early fifteenth century. Its earliest recorded use appears in an English translation of Grande Chirurgie, the authoritative surgical text of the medieval world. It was written by the French surgeon Guy de Chauliac in Avignon in 1363. The sense was medical, describing the action of driving a diseased fluid away from a swollen part of the body.

2. It came into English from two sources, from Old French and directly from Latin. Both routes led back to the same Latin verb, built from two elements. The first was a prefix meaning back or again. The second was a Latin verb meaning to strike through. Augustine, the fourth-century theologian, used the Latin form to describe the recoil of a thing after impact. By the time it reached English, the Latin form had been in use for over a thousand years.

3. Behind the Latin lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *kwet-, meaning to shake. It named the physical act of shaking something, of causing it to tremble or shudder. From that root came the Latin verb quatere, meaning to shake and to strike, used by Roman writers of the first century BC. In Latin the root branched. One branch gave percutere, the word for striking through something. Another gave quassare, the word for shattering violently. The same ancient root gave German its everyday word for shaking, schütteln.

4. CONCUSSION and RESCUE share the same ancient root. CONCUSSION came from Latin concutere, meaning to shake violently, from the same root as the Latin verb for shaking and striking. RESCUE came from the same ancient root by a different path, through Old French, from a Latin verb meaning to shake out or shake free.

5. For over a century in English the word remained in medicine. By the 1590s it had acquired a new sense, naming the echo or reverberation of a sound. By the early seventeenth century it had moved further still, naming an indirect effect or reaction from an event. Today it is the word the United Nations reaches for when describing the cascading effects of climate change, and the word journalists reach for when describing the unintended consequences of political decisions.

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1. The word entered English from Old French in the mid-fourteenth century. Richard Rolle, a Yorkshire mystic and hermit, used it around 1340 in a religious text. He used it to describe the name of Christ as something pleasant and delightful to the soul. Behind the Old French lay Latin, and behind Latin lay a single adjective meaning strong.

2. From Latin into Old French, and from Old French into English. In Latin an intensifying prefix was added to that same adjective, producing a verb. Old French took that verb and built an adjective from it. Anglo-Norman carried it across the Channel. William Langland used it in Piers Plowman, his long allegorical poem about the search for Christian truth, written around 1377, where he used it to describe deep remorse.

3. Behind the word lay the Latin adjective fortis, meaning strong. In classical Latin it meant physical strength, military courage and moral steadfastness. Roman soldiers were fortis. Roman philosophers applied it to the strength of the mind. Jerome used the Latin verb built from it in his translation of the Bible into Latin, completed around 405 AD, wherever the text called on someone to be strong.

4. FORT and FORTE share the same Latin root as this word. FORT came from Old French fort, from Latin fortis, naming the strong defensive structure built to withstand attack. FORTE came from the same root, first naming the strongest part of a sword blade, then the strong point of a person. One names a physical stronghold and the other, what a person does best. Both trace back to the Latin adjective that once described Roman soldiers and Stoic philosophers alike.

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1. The word entered English from Latin in the sixteenth century. Sir Thomas Elyot, a scholar and diplomat in the court of Henry VIII, used it around 1534 in its earliest recorded sense. He later wrote The Castel of Helth, one of the first medical handbooks in English. That sense was digestive, describing what the stomach does to food. Behind it lay the Latin word for cooking, boiling and ripening with heat.

2. It came directly from Latin, without passing through French. It was built from two Latin elements. The first was a prefix meaning together or with. The second was the Latin verb for cooking. Combined, they named the act of cooking several ingredients together. Roman cooks and physicians were using the Latin form by the first century BC. By the time it reached English in the sixteenth century it had been in use for over a thousand years.

3. Behind the Latin lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *pekw-, meaning to cook and to ripen. In the ancient world the two ideas were closely connected. The Roman agricultural writer Columella used the Latin verb for the ripening of fruit on the vine in De Re Rustica, his twelve-volume work on agriculture written around 60 AD. The same ancient root gave Sanskrit pacati, meaning he cooks, and Greek peptein, meaning to cook or digest.

4. BISCUIT and APRICOT share the same ancient root. BISCUIT came from Medieval Latin biscoctus, meaning twice cooked, from bis 'twice' and the past participle of the Latin verb for cooking. It was baked twice to remove all moisture and preserve it for long journeys. APRICOT came from Latin praecoquum, meaning early ripening, from prae 'before' and the same Latin verb for cooking, in its sense of ripening with heat. The Romans named the fruit for the fact that it ripened before other stone fruits. One names a twice-baked bread. The other names a fruit that ripens early.

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1. The word entered English from Old French in the late fourteenth century. Its earliest recorded sense was an arithmetical symbol. It arrived with the Arabic numeral system. Adelard of Bath, an English scholar who had travelled through North Africa and the Arab world, translated mathematical texts from Arabic into Latin around 1120, bringing Arabic numerals to Western European scholars.

2. It travelled from Sanskrit into Arabic, from Arabic into Medieval Latin, and from Medieval Latin into Old French before reaching English. The Arabic word entered Medieval Latin in two forms. One gave English this word. The other came through Fibonacci's Liber Abaci of 1202 and gave English a different word entirely.

3. In Arabic the root word meant empty. It was itself a translation of the Sanskrit śūnya, the word Hindu and Buddhist philosophers used for the void. Behind the Sanskrit lay a Proto-Indo-European root meaning hollow. The same ancient root may also lie behind the Latin word for a hollow space, which gave English its words for cave and cavity.

4. ZERO and ALGORITHM share the same ancient sources. ZERO came from the Arabic root, entering English through a different Medieval Latin form. Fibonacci used it in his 1202 book, which brought Arabic numerals to a wider audience across Western Europe. ALGORITHM came from the name of the ninth-century Arabic mathematician al-Khwarizmi, whose work on calculation gave medieval scholars their first systematic methods for arithmetic.

5. By the early fifteenth century the word's meaning had shifted to include any numeral. By the 1520s it shifted again, to a style of writing. Shakespeare used a related sense in King Lear in 1606, calling a fool 'an O without a figure', a nothing. During the Second World War the word became the focus of Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park. Today it also names a circle of hip-hop performers. The BET Hip Hop Awards has staged the format annually since 2006, with Kendrick Lamar delivering one of its most celebrated performances in 2013.

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1. An Old English word, formed within English. The verb it grew from meant to die. The word's earliest recorded use was in the Promptorium Parvulorum, the first English dictionary. It was compiled around 1440 by a Dominican friar named Geoffrey the Grammarian at King’s Lynn in Norfolk, during the reign of Henry VI.

2. The word didn't travel into English from another language. It grew from an Old English root that had been in the language since before the Norman Conquest. That root came from Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of Old English, Old Norse, Old Saxon and Gothic. In English, a suffix was added to it, giving the word a sense of something repeated or continuous.

3. Behind the Proto-Germanic root lay something older still. A Proto-Indo-European root meaning to shine and to beam. It named the shining and beaming of light. From that ancient root came the Old English verb meaning to burn. From burning came dying, and from dying came this word.

4. SELENE and SULTRY share the same ancient root as this word. SELENE was the Greek goddess of the moon, her name drawn from the same ancient root. SULTRY came from an older English verb meaning to be overcome by heat. One names the light of the moon. The other names the heat of a summer afternoon. Both share their deepest root with this word.

5. The meaning shifted slowly after its first recorded use. Its oldest sense was dying. By the 1440s the sense of fainting and being overcome had crept in alongside it. Shakespeare used a related form in Macbeth in 1606, describing the contents of the witches' cauldron. By then the dying sense had faded entirely. A word that once named the act of dying now names the result of a record-breaking summer's day.

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1. The word entered English from Latin around the eighth century, before the Norman Conquest. Its earliest recorded English use named an ancient unit of weight. It later named a sum of money. John Wycliffe used it in his 1384 Bible translation to name the coins a master gave his servants.

2. It reached English by two routes. The first came directly from Latin, which had taken it from Greek. Plautus, the Roman playwright, used it in his comedies around 200 BC, to describe large sums of money. The second route travelled through Old French, which had taken the Latin word in a different direction, using it to mean inclination or desire, arriving in English in the late thirteenth century. Dante used this sense in his Inferno, written around 1308. Behind both lay Greek, and behind Greek a Babylonian unit of weight whose name the Greeks borrowed and made their own.

3. In Greek it named a balance, a pair of scales. The instrument that measured gold, silver, and other metals. Behind the Greek lay a Proto-Indo-European root, tele-, meaning to lift. It sent branches across the ancient world. In Latin it became the act of lifting something up in praise.

4. ATLAS and EXTOL share the same ancient root as this word. ATLAS was the Titan condemned to bear the weight of the heavens on his shoulders. His name traditionally meant the bearer, from the same ancient root. EXTOL came from Latin extollere, from the same root, meaning to raise someone high in praise. One lifts the sky. The other lifts a person in words.

5. Its modern sense grew from a Biblical parable. In Matthew 25, a master gives three servants coins before a journey. Two invest and multiply. The third buries his in the ground and is condemned for it on the master's return. Medieval scholars read the parable as an instruction. God gives each person gifts and expects them to be used, not buried. By the mid-fifteenth century the word had shifted from the coins to the gifts themselves. John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk and poet at Bury St Edmunds, used it in this new sense around 1430.

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1. The word entered English from Old French in the late fourteenth century. John Trevisa, a Cornish scholar who translated major Latin works into English, used it around 1387 in his translation of Polychronicon, a universal history of the world. Its meaning then was specific and medieval, a narrative poem with a happy ending.

2. It travelled from Greek into Latin, and from Latin into Old French, before reaching English. Greek gave it to Roman playwrights including Plautus and Terence, who wrote plays with it around 200 BC. Latin carried it into medieval French scholarship. Old French gave it a new sense, a poem rather than a performance. By the time it reached English it had travelled for over fifteen hundred years.

3. The Greek word was built from two elements, kōmos and aoidos. The first named a revel, a noisy festival procession in honour of Dionysus, the god of wine. Behind the second element lay a Proto-Indo-European root simply meaning to sing. Put together they named the singer at the revel, the performer who led the songs at the festival in Athens from around the sixth century BC.

4. TRAGEDY and PARODY share the same ancient singing root as this word. TRAGEDY came from Greek tragōidia, from tragos 'goat' and ōidē 'song.' It literally meant a goat song. The reason for the goat remains one of the unresolved questions of classical scholarship. PARODY came from Greek parōidia, from para 'beside' and ōidē 'song.' It named a song performed alongside another, imitating it in a distorted or exaggerated form. Both trace back to the same ancient root as this word, the one that begins with a singer at a festival.

5. In the fourteenth century Dante named his Italian epic after it because it was written in everyday language rather than Latin and had a happy ending. In the sixteenth century the revival of classical learning restored the word to its theatrical sense. Nicholas Udall wrote what is considered the first modern English work of this kind in the 1550s, a play called Ralph Roister Doister. By the mid-1970s the word named places on both sides of the Atlantic where a new generation made their names. The London version, which opened in 1979 above a strip club in Soho, was inspired by what its founder had seen in New York and Los Angeles.

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