The word entered English around 1540, from Latin. Its earliest recorded sense meant fearful, or timid. The Scottish poet William Stewart, translating Hector Boece's Buik of Croniclis of Scotland into verse, used it in a warning to anyone too afraid to watch blood being drawn in battle.
Latin gave English the word first, in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century it had all but vanished from use, surviving only in the writing of the physician Sir Thomas Browne. More than a century later, French delivered the word into English again, this time with a different meaning.
Behind the Latin word lay a noun meaning fear, or dread, joined to a suffix also found in the Latin word for something dangerous, or full of peril. Where that noun for fear came from is unknown.
BOHEMIAN and GÂTEAU share something with this word, though not a common root. All three entered English from French within the very same decade, the 1840s. BOHEMIAN had already named the people of a Central European kingdom for centuries, but only in this decade did it come to describe an artist living outside conventional society. GÂTEAU, meanwhile, named a rich, decorated cake.
By 1827 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine had already used the word in its newer sense, applying it to a man whose habits went further than most people would allow themselves. In 1868 the philologist Richard Trench, whose own work helped launch the dictionary project that became the Oxford English Dictionary, said the word had no business coming back. Decades later H.W. Fowler, author of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, blamed literary critics for reviving it, and complained about it just as fiercely.
