Etymon #52
Satan's flight risk
The word entered English in the first half of the fourteenth century. Its earliest recorded use appears in a chronicle of England written in rhyming verse by Robert Mannyng, a Lincolnshire monk, completed around 1338. He used it to mean reckoning, in his case counting out the year of a king's accession. Behind the English lay French and Latin, and behind both lay the Latin word for weight.
It arrived in English twice, from Middle French and directly from Latin. The Latin verb meant to weigh and to weigh up, and was built on the noun for weight. In French it was first recorded in the 1350s, in a translation of Livy, the historian of Rome. The same Latin word had reached English once before. Centuries earlier, Old English borrowed from it a rare word for a scholar.
Behind the Latin lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *(s)pen-, meaning to stretch and to spin. It named the drawing out of a thread. From it came a Latin verb meaning to hang and to weigh, which in the Roman world were one action. From that verb came the noun for weight, and from weight came the verb behind this word.
POUND and SPEND share the same ancient root. POUND came from a Latin phrase meaning a pound by weight. Germanic tribes borrowed it from Roman traders on the continent, and the Anglo-Saxons carried it to Britain in the fifth century. SPEND came from a Latin verb meaning to weigh out money.
In 1553 King Edward VI needed to raise money, and his commissioners were moving through England's parishes, listing church treasures to be seized by the crown. In the city of York, a clerk reached for this word to record a silver chalice weighing four ounces. A century later, in Paradise Lost, John Milton used the word when describing God hanging his golden scales in heaven to weigh the outcome of a threatened fight between Satan, caught in the Garden of Eden, and the angel Gabriel. Satan looked up, saw his scale fly upward, and fled. Then in the nineteenth century the physical sense of weighing was dropped, leaving only the sense of weighing something mentally.
Six letters.
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