Etymon #57
Not the point
The word entered English in 1551. Its earliest recorded use appears in Castle of Knowledge, a book on astronomy by the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who used the word to describe a circle that did not share its centre with another.
It came into English from Middle French, itself borrowed from Medieval Latin. Behind both lay a Greek compound. Greek astronomers had used it to describe orbits that deviated from a perfect circle. Ptolemy was an astronomer who worked in Alexandria, Egypt, in the second century AD, and whose model of the universe placed the Earth at its centre. For over a thousand years, European scholars used his model, and carried the word through Latin into French, Italian, and Spanish before it crossed into English. Robert Burton used it in Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621, in his account of the Ptolemaic model of the heavens.
Behind the Greek compound lay two older words. The first was ek, a preposition meaning 'out of'. The second was kentron, meaning 'centre', from the Greek verb kentein, from a Proto-Indo-European root *kent- meaning to prick or stitch. It named the sharp point of a compass pressed into a surface to hold it steady while the circle was drawn around it. The centre of a circle was named after the instrument that marked it.
CENTRIFUGAL and CONCENTRATE share the same ancient root. CENTRIFUGAL entered English in the seventeenth century from Latin, combining the root for centre with fugere, meaning to flee, naming the force that drives things outward from the middle. CONCENTRATE came from the same Latin root, naming the act of drawing everything inward toward a single point. Both words share the same Greek root as this one, the sharp compass point that marks the centre.
