Etymon #63
Ten tight spots
The word entered English in the late fourteenth century as a technical term of logic. John Wyclif, the Oxford theologian who produced the first complete translation of the Bible into English, used it in one of his English writings, composed before 1382 and surviving in a manuscript copied around 1425. Wyclif was condemned as a heretic, and his body was exhumed and burned more than forty years after his death. He used it for the ten classes into which Aristotle had divided everything that exists, Substance, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position, State, Action and Passion. Wyclif wrote that fools must first learn them, and only then might they see their own folly. Behind the English lay French, and behind French lay a Latin word built to carry Greek.
Latin coined it in the fourth century for a single purpose, to translate one Greek word, kategoria, the term Aristotle had used for his ten classes. Augustine, the North African bishop whose Confessions became one of the most read books of the ancient world, used it around 400 AD in a different sense, a statement about what was to come. By the ninth century it could also mean a sermon. Old French took the Aristotle sense by the mid thirteenth century, and from French it passed into English. John Capgrave, an English friar writing around 1450, noted that Aristotle's own Greek title had by his day given way to the Latin word.
Behind the Latin word lay a verb, praedicāre, meaning 'to proclaim or declare publicly', built from two parts. The first was prae-, meaning 'forth' or 'before'. The second was dicāre, meaning 'to proclaim', the twin of dicere, meaning 'to say', two Latin verbs so close that scholars believe they began as one word. Behind both lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *deik-, meaning 'to show', and also 'to pronounce solemnly'. Sanskrit dic- means 'to point out', Greek deiknynai means 'to show or prove', and the same root gave Latin digitus, the finger, the thing that points. In Old English it became tæcan, the ancestor of teach.
PREACH and DICTIONARY share the same ancient root. PREACH came from the same Latin verb, praedicāre, and English borrowed it twice, first from Church Latin in the Old English period, then again in the twelfth century from Old French. A sermon and this word are, at their root, the same act of public declaration. DICTIONARY came from the twin verb dicere, through dictio, 'a saying', which in later Latin came to mean simply 'a word', and the Medieval Latin dictionarium, a book of words, is said to have been used first by John of Garland, an English scholar in Paris, as the title of a Latin vocabulary around 1220.
