The word entered English in the 1570s from French, itself drawn from Latin. It had appeared in Anglo-Norman as early as the second half of the fourteenth century, already carrying the sense of noble birth. Its earliest English sense described a fortune of birth rather than a quality of character. Edward Hellowes, a groom of the Chamber to Queen Elizabeth I, used it in 1574 in his translation of the Familiar Epistles of Antonio de Guevara, the Spanish bishop and court chronicler. Behind the English lay French, and behind French lay Latin.

French carried it into English, drawing on a Latin root already established in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Among the Anglo-Norman nobility in England it had been in use since the late fourteenth century, naming the accident of birth that separated an aristocrat from a commoner. Shakespeare used it in Hamlet, written around 1600, applying it to Hamlet himself, whose noble-minded openness Claudius exploited, knowing a man of such birth and breeding would never suspect treachery in a fencing match.

Behind the Latin adjective lay the noun genus, meaning 'race, stock and kind', the word Romans used for the lineage that defined a family's place in the world. Virgil built the entire argument of the Aeneid, c.19 BC, his epic poem about the founding of Rome, on it, tracing the bloodline of his hero from the gods of Troy to justify Rome's claim to rule the ancient world. Behind genus lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *gene-, meaning 'to give birth or beget'. Sanskrit janati means 'to bear a child', and Greek built gignesthai from the same root, meaning 'to come into being'. The same root gave Latin gignere, meaning 'to father a child', and reached Old English as the ancestor of the word for a king.

GENIUS and GENTLE share the same Latin root. GENIUS came from Latin genius, the divine spirit Romans believed a father passed to his children at birth, the procreative force that ran through a family's blood. GENTLE came from Latin gentilis, meaning 'of the same clan or race', and entered English around 1200 describing the well-born and noble, and now names a quality of character available to anyone.

Etymon #62

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