Etymon #72
Drawn two ways
The word entered English around 1400, from Old French and Latin. Its earliest recorded use appears in an English translation of Lanfranc of Milan's Science of Cirurgie, a surgical textbook of the medieval period. It named a remedy's ability to draw diseased matter out through the skin, coaxing infection to the surface rather than cutting it out.
French and Latin both gave the word to English around 1400. In French it named both the drawing of breath and of bodily fluids. In Latin, the philosopher Albertus Magnus used it around 1260 to describe matter being absorbed into a body.
Behind the Latin word lay two parts, a prefix meaning to, or toward, and a verb meaning to pull, or to draw. Behind that verb lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *tragh-, meaning to drag. The same root gave Slovenian a word for a trace or a track, and Middle Irish a word for the ebb of the tide.
TRAIN and TREATY share the same distant root as this word. TRAIN entered English in the late fourteenth century, naming the trailing part of a gown or cloak, and only in 1820 came to mean a line of railway carriages. TREATY, which also entered English in the late fourteenth century, came from a Latin verb meaning to handle or manage, though its own root meant to drag about, to haul, to pull violently.
By the early seventeenth century the word had left medicine for matters of the heart. In 1607 the poet Christopher Lever used it to describe the beauty that could enslave men, while the playwright George Chapman, in the very same year, used it for the pull of a royal court. The word did not settle into its other familiar modern sense, a place built to draw visitors, until 1829. In 1987 a movie directed by Adrian Lyne, in which a character spirals into obsession, used the word as a warning, and helped launch a new wave of Hollywood filmmaking.
Ten letters.
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