Etymon #23
Twenty four seven
Borrowed from Latin, the word entered English in the late fourteenth century. Its earliest recorded sense appears in John Trevisa's translation of a medieval encyclopaedia, completed around 1398, where it described what the dry heat of the harvest season does to moisture in the ground.
The word reached English by two routes simultaneously. It came directly from classical Latin, and it came through Old French, which had taken the same Latin verb in the twelfth century. The Latin form was a compound: a prefix meaning 'with' or 'together', used here probably as an intensifier, joined to a verb meaning 'to take'.
The Latin verb sūmere meant 'to take'. It descended from a Proto-Indo-European root carrying the same sense: to take, to acquire, to distribute. The Latin compound built on it added force to that taking. Its literal meaning was to take up entirely.
From the same Latin root came a noun: sumptus, meaning 'expense, cost', the noun formed from the act of taking. It produced two English words. SUMPTUOUS, meaning costly and lavish, entered English by 1494. SUMPTUARY followed in the late sixteenth century, giving its name to the laws that regulated how much ordinary people were permitted to spend.
Its earliest English senses ranged from the gentle to the violent: moisture dispersed by summer heat, buildings destroyed by fire, bodies worn away by plague. Then in 1601, Gerard de Malynes, an Elizabethan merchant and writer on trade, used it in a new sense. Writing about the flow of foreign goods into England, he described what happens to goods upon entering a market.
Seven letters.
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