The word entered English from Old French in the late fourteenth century. John Trevisa, a Cornish scholar who translated major Latin works into English, used it around 1387 in his translation of Polychronicon, a universal history of the world. Its meaning then was specific and medieval, a narrative poem with a happy ending.

It travelled from Greek into Latin, and from Latin into Old French, before reaching English. Greek gave it to Roman playwrights including Plautus and Terence, who wrote plays with it around 200 BC. Latin carried it into medieval French scholarship. Old French gave it a new sense, a poem rather than a performance. By the time it reached English it had travelled for over fifteen hundred years.

The Greek word was built from two elements, kōmos and aoidos. The first named a revel, a noisy festival procession in honour of Dionysus, the god of wine. Behind the second element lay a Proto-Indo-European root simply meaning to sing. Put together they named the singer at the revel, the performer who led the songs at the festival in Athens from around the sixth century BC.

TRAGEDY and PARODY share the same ancient singing root as this word. TRAGEDY came from Greek tragōidia, from tragos 'goat' and ōidē 'song.' It literally meant a goat song. The reason for the goat remains one of the unresolved questions of classical scholarship. PARODY came from Greek parōidia, from para 'beside' and ōidē 'song.' It named a song performed alongside another, imitating it in a distorted or exaggerated form. Both trace back to the same ancient root as this word, the one that begins with a singer at a festival.

In the fourteenth century Dante named his Italian epic after it because it was written in everyday language rather than Latin and had a happy ending. In the sixteenth century the revival of classical learning restored the word to its theatrical sense. Nicholas Udall wrote what is considered the first modern English work of this kind in the 1550s, a play called Ralph Roister Doister. By the mid-1970s the word named places on both sides of the Atlantic where a new generation made their names. The London version, which opened in 1979 above a strip club in Soho, was inspired by what its founder had seen in New York and Los Angeles.

Etymon #44

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