Etymon #49
Emma started it
The word entered English from Old French in the mid-fourteenth century. Richard Rolle, a Yorkshire mystic and hermit, used it around 1340 in a religious text. He used it to describe the name of Christ as something pleasant and delightful to the soul. Behind the Old French lay Latin, and behind Latin lay a single adjective meaning strong.
From Latin into Old French, and from Old French into English. In Latin an intensifying prefix was added to that same adjective, producing a verb. Old French took that verb and built an adjective from it. Anglo-Norman carried it across the Channel. William Langland used it in Piers Plowman, his long allegorical poem about the search for Christian truth, written around 1377, where he used it to describe deep remorse.
Behind the word lay the Latin adjective fortis, meaning strong. In classical Latin it meant physical strength, military courage and moral steadfastness. Roman soldiers were fortis. Roman philosophers applied it to the strength of the mind. Jerome used the Latin verb built from it in his translation of the Bible into Latin, completed around 405 AD, wherever the text called on someone to be strong.
FORT and FORTE share the same Latin root as this word. FORT came from Old French fort, from Latin fortis, naming the strong defensive structure built to withstand attack. FORTE came from the same root, first naming the strongest part of a sword blade, then the strong point of a person. One names a physical stronghold and the other, what a person does best. Both trace back to the Latin adjective that once described Roman soldiers and Stoic philosophers alike.
