Etymon #31
Dairy of philosopher
The word entered English in the 1530s, borrowed from Latin. Its first recorded English use appears in 1533 in Thomas Elyot's Castel of Helthe. The Latin source named what cattle and sheep do with food.
It came directly from classical Latin. It arrived in the sixteenth century as scholars translated ancient texts and brought their vocabulary with them. The compilers of the 1547 Book of Homilies used it in a passage that held both its Latin senses together, the bodily and the contemplative.
The Latin root named a specific part of a grazing animal's digestive system. The verb built on it named a return journey. The word carried that physical image into English.
Two other English words share its Latin origins and arrived in the sixteenth century. DIGEST came from Latin digerere, the act of breaking food down and distributing its nutrients through the body. REGURGITATE came from Latin regurgitare, the act of bringing food or liquid back up. All three describe what the body does with food.
Shakespeare used the word in Troilus and Cressida, composed around 1602, comparing a man lost in thought to an innkeeper with no ledger but her own brain to keep her accounts. By the twentieth century the word had taken on a third meaning. In 1966 psychiatrists began using it to describe a specific condition, when the mind cannot stop returning to the same thought.
Eight letters.
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