The word first entered English by 1516, from Latin, and before that, Greek. The Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande, a printed collection of saints' lives, used the word to describe the city where Mellitus was made bishop in the year 604.
Latin borrowed the word directly from Greek, without passing through French. By the fourth century it named the seat of a bishop.
Behind the word lay two Greek parts, one meaning ‘mother’, the other meaning ‘city’. The first traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *mater-, found in languages such as Latin and Sanskrit. The second traces to a different root, *tpolh-, meaning a fortified hilltop.
MOTHER and POLICE share the same roots. MOTHER comes from the same ancient root as the first half, found in languages from Sanskrit to Old Irish. POLICE comes from the second half, entering English in the 1530s, originally meaning civil administration rather than a police force, which came centuries later.
By the 1580s the word had come to name the chief town of a country, and eventually any large, bustling city. By the mid-seventeenth century, it had also taken on its ancient Greek meaning directly, naming the state from which a colony had originally set out, as Thomas Hobbes described in 1651.
