1. Borrowed from Japanese, this word entered English in 1857, in the diplomatic correspondence of newly arrived Americans in a Japan that had been closed to the West for more than two centuries. Its original sense was not what most readers now picture: it was the title of a ruler.

2. The word's path runs back through two languages. Japanese took it from Chinese, where it was a compound of two ancient characters: one meaning 'great', the other meaning 'prince' or 'lord'. Japanese officials revived the title in the seventeenth century, when their ruler needed a formal designation worthy of foreign emissaries.

3. The earliest meaning was a feudal warlord. Japan in the seventeenth century had two parallel rulers: an emperor of ancient lineage who held no political power, and a military commander who held it all. The commander's title meant 'general of the army', a designation considered unsuited to formal diplomacy. So Tokugawa officials revived an older, grander term: 'great prince', conveying to foreigners that their chief was the true ruler.

4. Among the English words that entered from Japanese during the same brief opening of Japan to the West, JINRIKISHA, the original form of what English speakers later shortened to rickshaw, came into English in 1874. JU-JITSU followed in 1875. Both crossed into English after Commodore Perry's expedition arrived in Japan in 1853 and forced the country to open its ports to American trade.

5. Four years after the word entered English, it crossed the Pacific. In April 1861, John Hay, private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, recorded the nickname the president was called around the White House. A word that had named a Japanese commander was now naming an American president. By the time of the First World War, the word had shifted again, it now named an American industrialist.

6. Six letters.

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Etymon #16 Answer Card

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1. Borrowed from French and Latin, the word entered English before 1393, in the writing of the Middle English poet John Gower. Its original sense was nothing to do with what most readers now picture: it named a kind of motion in the sky.

2. The word's path runs back through two languages. French took it from a post-classical Latin noun, which itself came from a classical Latin verb meaning to roll. The Latin verb had described both physical motion and abstract reflection for centuries before the noun form entered the broader vocabulary of medieval Europe.

3. The earliest meaning was a return. The Latin root named the action of rolling back to a starting point, and in medieval astronomical writing it described the regular orbital motion of a celestial body, the way a star or planet completes its path through the sky and arrives back where it began.

4. The same Latin root appears in English words including VOLUME, CONVOLUTED, and INVOLVE. All three trace back to the ancient verb 'to roll', though the senses have travelled far apart. The original meaning of VOLUME was a papyrus scroll, the form a written work took before it took the form of a book.

5. In 1688, when English Protestants forced the Catholic King James II from the throne and brought in William of Orange and Mary, writers reached for this word to name the event. In its old sense, the word meant a return: a coming-back of constitutional rule, an orbit completing its turn. A century later, in 1789, when the French stormed the Bastille, the word was reached for again, but the sense had shifted. Now it meant breaking, not returning. By the nineteenth century, the political sense had eclipsed the astronomical one in everyday English.

6. Ten letters.

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Etymon #15 Answer Card

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1. Borrowed from Scottish Gaelic, the word entered English in 1513, in a translation of a Latin classic by a Scottish poet. Its original sense was nothing to do with what the word now describes: it named a cry.

2. The word's path runs back through two languages. Scottish Gaelic took it from Old Irish, where it was a compound of two ancient roots: one meaning 'army, host', the other meaning 'cry, shout'. The form first appeared in English in 1513, when Gavin Douglas, a Scottish poet and later Bishop of Dunkeld, completed the first full English translation of Virgil's Aeneid. At least four different spelling variants appeared in print between 1513 and 1700 before the settled form emerged. By 1704 the sense had begun to shift from a martial cry to a phrase associated with a person or cause, but the modern meaning was still a century away.

3. The earliest meaning was a battle cry. On Highland, Border, and Irish battlefields, a clansman would shout his own surname, or the name of his gathering place, as he ran into the fight. The cry was both rallying call and recognition signal: it raised the spirits of his fellows and identified him as one of their own. In the confusion of close-quarters combat, the cry told a man who fought beside him and who fought against him.

4. The same Proto-Indo-European root appears in English words including GARRULOUS and CARE. All three trace back to an ancient word for a call or cry, though the senses have travelled far apart.

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1. Borrowed from Portuguese through French, the word entered English in 1578, in a legal petition about hampering creditors. Its original sense was nothing to do with what the word now describes: it named a kind of restraint.

2. The word's path runs back through three Romance languages. French gave it to English in the sixteenth century, after taking it from Spanish, which had taken it from Portuguese. The Portuguese verb is thought to derive from a root meaning 'to put a cord on, to restrain an animal by a leash’, though etymologists remain uncertain about the deeper origin. John Dryden used it in 1668 in Of Dramatick Poesie, complaining that the French do not 'cumber themselves with too much Plot'. By then the sense had begun to shift from physical restraint to mental difficulty, but the modern meaning was still nearly a century away.

3. The earliest meaning was external restraint. The Portuguese root verb described what a herdsman did to a wandering animal: a cord around the neck, a leash to the post, the beast brought to a halt. To suffer it was to be tied up against one's will, kept from going where one wished.

4. The same Romance prefix appears in English words including EMBARGO and EMBROIL. All three carry the ancient sense of being held back or tangled up.

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1. A century and a half after the Norman Conquest, when French was still entering English, the word arrived from Anglo-Norman at the turn of the thirteenth century, drawn from a deeper Latin source. Its earliest English sense involved the tongue and a kind of slow attention, though the Latin verb behind it carried a second meaning as well.

2. Before reaching English, the word had a long life in Latin and Anglo-Norman. Marie de France was composing her Anglo-Norman lais, short verse poems that became foundational to medieval French literature, at the court of Henry II when this word was already in use in the French vocabulary that English would soon absorb. It travelled from post-classical Latin into Old French in the 12th century, then into English at the turn of the thirteenth. Behind it lay a classical Latin noun and a cousin verb of the same root.

3. The classical Latin verb meant to taste, and it also meant to be wise. The same verb that named the careful palate named the careful mind. Tasting and knowing were one word in Latin.

4. The Latin root produced English words at both ends of its meaning. INSIPID, from the negation of the tasting branch, names both the lack of flavour and the lack of intelligence in a single word. HOMO SAPIENS, the species name humans gave themselves in the eighteenth century, draws on the wisdom branch, meaning wise man, named for the same act that names a careful taster.

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1. Borrowed from Hindi, the word entered English in 1762, in a published memoir of a voyage to the East Indies by a British naval officer. Its original sense was nothing to do with what the word now describes: it named an act done to the body.

2. The first English appearance was in 1762, in a memoir of a voyage by Charles Frederick Noble, a British naval officer who had sailed for the East India Company through Java and on to Canton. The Hindi verb he transcribed travelled with him from port to port, written down in several different spellings as it crossed from speech into print. The form we now use settled in the nineteenth century, when the practice the word named had already begun to shift.

3. The earliest meaning was a kind of massage. The Hindi verb described the act of kneading and pressing the muscles with the hands, a practice long used in India to relieve fatigue and restore the body. To receive one in 1762 was to be given a thorough working-over of the limbs and back.

4. The same period of British presence in India brought English a wide family of Hindi words. PYJAMAS and CHUTNEY are two of them. So is this word.

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1. Borrowed from Spanish, the word entered English in 1555. Its original sense was nothing to do with what the word now describes: it named something held to be a power in the world.

2. Two Spanish chroniclers recorded the word from indigenous speakers in the early sixteenth century. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, writing his history of the Indies in the 1540s, gave it one spelling. Peter Martyr, chaplain at the Spanish court, gave it another. Richard Eden's 1555 translation preserved both forms side by side, and English took more than a century to settle on a single version.

3. The original meaning was the name of a god. In the cosmology of the Taíno people of the Caribbean, the supreme mother goddess Atabey had a violent counterpart called Guabancex. She worked through two named assistants, Guataubá and Coatrisquie, each summoning a different aspect of the natural disorder she commanded. To speak the word was to invoke that divine retinue and the chaos it could loose upon the world.

4. The Spanish chronicles of the early sixteenth century brought English a small family of indigenous Caribbean words, including HAMMOCK and BARBECUE. Both come from Taíno. So does this word.

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1. Borrowed from Arabic, the word entered English around 1400, in a Middle English translation of Chirurgia Magna, a Latin treatise on surgery written a century earlier by Lanfranc of Milan, an Italian surgeon practising in Paris as personal physician to the king of France. Its original sense was nothing to do with what the word now means: it described the restoring of something broken back to its proper place.

2. Two routes carried the word into English, a century and a half apart. Both began in Arabic, both passed through medieval Latin in the twelfth century, and both arrived in English carrying the same buried sense untranslated. The first entered around 1400 through surgical writing. The second came in the 1550s through the Italian, Spanish, and Latin of Renaissance scholars.

3. The earliest meaning was the setting of broken bones. The Arabic root described the surgeon's act of bringing the parts of a fractured bone back into their proper relation, restoring the bone to its original alignment.

4. Arabic gave English a family of words at the same time, all carrying the al- of the Arabic definite article still fused to the front: ALCOHOL, ALCHEMY, ALKALI, all entering through Latin in the period when European scholars were translating Arabic learning. This word belongs to the same family.

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1. Borrowed from German, the word entered English in the 1830s, brought over by immigrants whose language carried it down from the Latin of monks and Greek before them. Its original sense was not to do with food: it described a shape made by the body itself.

2. Its first recorded English appearance is in an advertisement in the Ohio Repository of Canton, Ohio, on 23 December 1831, but the path is older. It runs through German, and before that Old High German, and before that Latin, with a Greek root deeper still. At every stage the word named the same part of the body.

3. The Latin root bracchium named the forearm, the limb between elbow and wrist, and the diminutive shape behind the word meant little arms. What gave the word its form was the figure arms make when folded one over the other.

4. The same Latin root reached English by other roads. It gave us BRACELET, a band worn on the arm, and EMBRACE, the act of taking someone into the arms. Both wear the arm-meaning openly. This word does not.

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1. Around 1175, an Augustinian canon from south Lincolnshire named Orm wrote the Ormulum, a vast verse commentary on the Gospels. The poem holds one of the first written uses of a word for inward suffering. It surfaces again around 1250 in the Owl and the Nightingale, an anonymous debate poem. Eight centuries on, few who use it daily would guess what it first meant.

2. The word arrived with Norse-speaking settlers, the Scandinavians who held the north and east of England from the ninth century, in the territory the Anglo-Saxons called the Danelaw. Old Norse and Old English were close cousins then, near enough that a settler and a local could broadly understand each other, and words crossed easily between them. In the colloquial speech of Orm's own country it took hold, until it no longer sounded foreign at all.

3. The original sense was grief, an affliction that weighs on a person from within. Beneath it lay an older root meaning tightness, as though the feeling closed around the chest and would not loosen. The emotion was named from the body: a physical narrowing felt before it was ever a state of mind.

4. The same root reached English by another road, through Latin. It gave us ANGINA and ANXIOUS, both from a verb meaning to choke. They still carry the old sense of constriction their Norse cousin left behind.

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1. The word entered English in the late thirteenth century, borrowed directly from Old French in the years after the Norman Conquest had transformed English administrative vocabulary. Its earliest English use named a wrong done against another, a breach of moral law or duty. The Old French source carried an older meaning that survives, buried, in the modern word.

2. In the late fourteenth century, William Langland wrote Piers Plowman, a Middle English dream-vision in which the dreamer Will searches for salvation through the sin and corruption of his time. Langland reaches for the word repeatedly to name wrongs done against truth, neighbour, and God. The word's earlier life lay in Anglo-Norman legal writing, where it had named violations of duty and law for nearly a century before.

3. In Old French, the compound named a movement before it named a wrong. The literal meaning was older and more physical: leaving one side of a line to reach the other, when that movement was not permitted. From this physical act the moral and legal meanings later grew.

4. The two roots that built the compound survive separately in modern English. PASSPORT carries one of them: a document granting the right to cross between countries. TRANSIT carries the other: the act of moving across from place to place. Both preserve the neutral physical meaning the older compound darkened into wrongdoing.

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1. The word entered English in the late fourteenth century, borrowed from Old French and ultimately from a Greek source. Its earliest English use named something familiar to every medieval observer, visible to anyone who looked up on a clear night. The Greek source carried a specific meaning more striking than the modern sense suggests.

2. In Chaucer's House of Fame, composed around 1380, the narrator dreams of being carried through the heavens by a golden eagle sent by Jupiter. The eagle offers to show him features of the sky, and in that passage Chaucer reaches for the new Greek-derived word. Before reaching English, the word had travelled from a Greek source through Late Latin and Old French, carrying a specific everyday meaning.

3. The Greek source word was an adjective meaning milky, formed from the noun gala, meaning milk. The full Greek phrase named the milky circle of starlight that medieval observers saw stretching across the heavens. The largest structure visible in the night sky was named, by the ancient Greeks, for the likeness to milk.

4. The same root produced descendants in Latin and through Latin into English. LACTOSE, the sugar found in milk, descends directly from the Latin word for milk. LETTUCE, the salad leaf, takes its name from the Latin lactuca, the milky plant, named for the white sap that runs from its stems when broken. The cosmic word and the salad leaf share a single ancient root for milk.

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1. The word descends from Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and was already in use before the Norman Conquest. Its earliest sense involved shelter and lodging: the kind of place a traveller might be taken in for the night. The older meaning behind the modern shelter sense carried something more specific.

2. Before the modern spelling settled, the word travelled through Middle English in several variant forms, used by writers across the late medieval period. Chaucer reached for it in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, describing the company gathered at the Tabard Inn in Southwark before setting out on the pilgrimage road. The word's earlier life lay in the Old English spoken in the centuries before.

3. The Old English word was a compound, built from two older roots. The first meant army, a body of soldiers on campaign. The second meant protection, the shelter that kept them safe. Put the two together and the literal meaning emerges: a shelter for an army.

4. The two roots that built the compound survive separately in modern English. HARRY, in its older sense, means to attack or raid: the same Old English root that meant army, the body of soldiers on the march. BOROUGH preserves the second root, the fortified town built to keep danger out. Both roots survive in English, each preserving one half of the older meaning.

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1. The adjective entered English in the late 1590s, a borrowing from scholarly Latin. Its earliest English use described pairs of structures in the body, named long ago for their resemblance to something earlier and more familiar.

2. Before it reached English, the word had a long life in scholarly Latin, the language of medical writing. Jacques Guillemeau, a pupil and son-in-law of Ambroise Paré, the father of modern surgery, used the word in his French surgical manual at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris in the 1590s. A Dutch edition followed, and from that came the English translation, printed at Dordrecht in 1598. By 1615, the adjective had quietly become a noun as well.

3. The Latin source noun meant collarbone. It was a diminutive: a smaller version of an older noun naming a wooden crossbar laid across the shoulders of two oxen so they could draw a plough together. The bone takes its name from the resemblance: a crossbar of bone above the chest, a crossbar of wood above the oxen.

4. To join, to bind together: that was the meaning of the deeper root. It survives in English as YOKE and in Sanskrit as YOGA. Both carry the sense of binding, and both reach back to a time when joining things together was the daily work of agriculture and craft.

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1. Borrowed from scholarly Latin, the verb entered English in 1599. The Latin root carried a physical image, a watcher in a tower scanning the horizon, but the earliest English meaning was already metaphorical: the mind's careful attention, the act of contemplation.

2. Three routes carried this word into English. The noun came through Old French in the late 1300s. William Caxton tried to borrow the verb directly from French in the 1480s, but it didn't take. The verb that survived arrived through Latin in the 1590s.

3. In Latin, the source verb meant to watch, to observe, to keep something in view. It descends from an older Proto-Indo-European root meaning to look. The original sense was bodily and immediate, fixed on whatever the eye could reach.

4. The same Proto-Indo-European root passed through Greek and produced English words including SCOPE, TELESCOPE, and HOROSCOPE. All are about looking closely, with care.

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Etymon is a daily puzzle about the origins of English words. Every day, one word is hidden behind six clues drawn from its etymological history.

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