Etymon #39
Roman sporting agreement
The word entered English before 1398, in John Trevisa's translation of a Latin encyclopedia called De Proprietatibus Rerum. Its first English meaning was a measure of land. Within fifty years it had acquired a second meaning, a division of the Roman army consisting of a group of men.
It arrived in English by two routes. From Old French it carried its military sense, the kind that organised soldiers. From Latin scholarship it carried a broader sense, any collection of things sharing a common quality. As the language absorbed both, the word's term began to expand beyond its Roman origins.
Behind the Latin lay something older. A Proto-Indo-European root dekm- meaning ‘ten’ sent branches across the ancient world, into Sanskrit, Greek, Germanic, and Latin. Each language took the root somewhere different. In Latin it produced two separate words, decem, and one that went further.
TITHE and DIME share the same ancient root. TITHE came from Old English, naming the tenth part of a person's income paid to the church, a tax levied on English parishes for over a thousand years. DIME came through Latin and French, naming the tenth part of an American dollar. One kept a foot in the English church, one in the American pocket. Both trace back to the same Proto-Indo-European root for ten as this word.
By the seventeenth century the word had settled into a new term, while bypassing the word Rome itself used. Then in 1864, the year W.G. Grace began his career and the first Wisden Cricketers' Almanack was published, Bell's Life in London, a weekly sporting newspaper and the leading authority on cricket in Victorian England, applied the word to cricket for the first time. In doing so, cricket used the word the way Rome always had.
Seven letters.
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