The word was first recorded in English in 1613, from Portuguese, by way of French. Samuel Purchas, an English clergyman, in his work Purchas His Pilgrimage, used it to describe straw rings, which were believed to be gods.
French had already used the word by 1605, in a translation of a Dutch text. Behind the French form lay a Portuguese word, originally an adjective.
Behind that Portuguese word lay the meaning 'made by art, or skilfully contrived'. It traces to a Latin word with the same meaning, and beyond that, to a Proto-Indo-European root, *dhē-, meaning 'to set, or put'.
DO and FACT share that same root, meaning ‘to set, or put’. DO is native to Old English, meaning ‘to make, act, or perform’. FACT entered English in the 1530s, from Latin, originally meaning ‘a thing done’, whether good or evil.
By 1670 the word had broadened beyond West Africa, describing any object worshipped for its own supposed magical power, rather than as the image of a god. In 1837, American writers started using the word to describe any object of excessive devotion, a sense the philosopher Karl Marx later applied to the value people place on manufactured goods. By the close of the nineteenth century the word had also taken on a type of psychological meaning, still in use today.
Six letters.
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