The word was first recorded in English by 1400, from Latin. It appears in a translation of the Milanese surgeon Lanfranc's Science of Cirurgie, describing small pricks that some surgeons make on a patient in the form of a cross. That sense is now obsolete.
Latin had already used the word by the early thirteenth century, in texts written in Britain, and English took it straight from Latin. In 1609 the composer John Dowland translated a Latin treatise on music and used it for a division marked by a dot.
Behind the word lay a Latin noun for an act of stabbing, built on a verb meaning to pierce. That verb comes from a Proto-Indo-European root, *peuk-, meaning 'to prick', shared with Latin pugnus, 'fist', and possibly with Greek pygme, 'fist, boxing'.
POUNCE and POIGNANT share the same root. POUNCE meant a hawk's claw by the late fifteenth century, probably from Old French. POIGNANT entered English in the late fourteenth century, from Old French, for a sauce or a feeling that hurts.
In 1954 T. S. Eliot's play The Confidential Clerk used it in a greeting, 'there you are, Eggerson! ... as always'. In 1997 the magazine Rail listed it among 'the basics' of a railway, alongside clean trains and sensible prices.
Eight letters.
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