The word entered English in 1489, from French and Latin. William Caxton, England's first printer, used it in his translation of a French treatise on the art of war, describing a division of Macedonian soldiers.
Latin gave it to French in the fourteenth century. French, in turn, gave it to English, more than a hundred years later, changing little in the process. The modern spelling changed only one letter from the Latin original.
Behind the Latin lay a noun meaning an enclosure, built from a prefix meaning together, and a second element related to the Latin word for a garden. Behind that lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *gher-, meaning to grasp. The same root gave Greek a word for a pasture.
GARDEN and CURTAIN share the same root. GARDEN entered English in the late thirteenth century, from Old French, describing an enclosed plot for growing plants. CURTAIN entered English around 1300, from a Latin word that originally meant a round vessel, before an early Bible translation gave it the sense of a hanging cloth.
By the eighteenth century the word had drifted from the military sense, naming a like-minded group. In 1944 the sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild gave it a new meaning for a group of people sharing the same birth year. American English, by the 1950s, had pushed the word further still, using it for a single companion or accomplice.
