The word entered English in 1706, from French and Latin. Its earliest recorded use appears in a dictionary first compiled by Edward Phillips, the nephew and pupil of John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, describing the lancing of a swollen abscess in the shape of a cross.
French delivered the word into English. The French form itself is first recorded in the sixteenth century, in the surgical writings of Ambroise Paré, a barber-surgeon who pioneered new techniques for treating battlefield wounds and helped transform surgery into a respected medical science. Behind the French word is the Latin word for a cross.
Behind the Latin word lay the noun for a cross. Where the noun itself came from is disputed, with proposed links to an ancient word for a heap or hill, and another for a human backbone, though neither has been confirmed. English did not borrow the noun directly until more than a century after this word had already entered the language, and even then, it first meant a difficult problem before it ever meant a physical cross.
CRUX and CRUCIVERBALIST share the same Latin root as this word. CRUX entered English in 1814, meaning a physical cross, though its figurative sense, a central point of difficulty, had already been in use for nearly a century by then. CRUCIVERBALIST is a modern coinage, first used in 1975, naming a crossword enthusiast, built directly from the same Latin word for cross.
In 1620 Francis Bacon coined a Latin phrase for a particular kind of evidence, one capable of deciding between two rival explanations once and for all, comparing it to a signpost standing at a fork in the road. Isaac Newton adopted Bacon's phrase in 1672 to describe his own defining experiment with light and prisms. By 1830 the astronomer John Herschel had translated Bacon's idea into plain English for a general readership.
