The word was first recorded in English by 1425, from French and Latin, in a Middle English version of the Rule of St Benedict. The passage observes that grievous scandals often arise when a prioress is appointed.
Latin had used the word by the fourth century, and French by 1279. English already had an older word for the same thing, found in the Old English translation of the scholar Bede's Ecclesiastical History and still part of Westminster.
Behind the Latin word lay a Greek word, built from a verb meaning 'to live alone' and a suffix for the place where something is done. The Greek word for 'alone' may trace to a Proto-Indo-European root, *men-, meaning 'small, or isolated', which may also lie behind a Greek word for 'sparse'.
MONARCHY and MONOPOLY share a Greek root with this word. MONARCHY came into English in the mid-fourteenth century from French and Latin, from Greek monarkhia, 'government by a single ruler', and could name the kingdom as well as the rule. MONOPOLY followed in the 1530s through Latin, from Greek monopลlion, 'right of exclusive sale', for sole control of a trade.
In 1539 a priest in Spain used its plural to jeer that Henry VIII was a good Christian for putting them down. And in 1800 Captain Samuel Turner's account of his embassy to Tibet used it for the Buddhist communities there. Today it more commonly describes the home of a group living under religious vows.
