Etymon #46
Record breaking cause
An Old English word, formed within English. The verb it grew from meant to die. The word's earliest recorded use was in the Promptorium Parvulorum, the first English dictionary. It was compiled around 1440 by a Dominican friar named Geoffrey the Grammarian at King’s Lynn in Norfolk, during the reign of Henry VI.
The word didn't travel into English from another language. It grew from an Old English root that had been in the language since before the Norman Conquest. That root came from Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of Old English, Old Norse, Old Saxon and Gothic. In English, a suffix was added to it, giving the word a sense of something repeated or continuous.
Behind the Proto-Germanic root lay something older still. A Proto-Indo-European root meaning to shine and to beam. It named the shining and beaming of light. From that ancient root came the Old English verb meaning to burn. From burning came dying, and from dying came this word.
SELENE and SULTRY share the same ancient root as this word. SELENE was the Greek goddess of the moon, her name drawn from the same ancient root. SULTRY came from an older English verb meaning to be overcome by heat. One names the light of the moon. The other names the heat of a summer afternoon. Both share their deepest root with this word.
The meaning shifted slowly after its first recorded use. Its oldest sense was dying. By the 1440s the sense of fainting and being overcome had crept in alongside it. Shakespeare used a related form in Macbeth in 1606, describing the contents of the witches' cauldron. By then the dying sense had faded entirely. A word that once named the act of dying now names the result of a record-breaking summer's day.
Seven letters.
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