So gall from Old English galla, as in gall stones from bile secretions, too is derived from this PIE root! The echoes of yellowness permeate this quartet. All derivatives refer to bright materials, yellow colors, bile, and gold. Gilt, gild and gold too are all etymologically connected to Proto-Germanic *gulthjan itself derived from *gulthan gold from PIE root *ghel- (2) “to shine”. Read more about Blake’s use of Albion here This picture was earlier known as Glad Day or Jocund Day, because Blake’s biographer Alexander Gilcrest assumed that it illustrated a passage from Act III, Scene v of Romeo and Juliet. William Blake’s: The Dance of Albion, 1795, also known as Albion Rose or Glad Day. And when considering radiant brightness and shining gladness, be dazzled by Blake’s painting below, originally called Glad Day. Both the OED and Online Etymology Dictionary note its current decline to a tepid state of pleasure and satisfaction, a weakening from its original sense of radiant brightness. The Old English etymon is from Proto-Germanic *glada- and derives from the PIE root of approximately 5, 500 years ago *ghel- (2). Glad: From Old English glæd, and shine brightly. The following words do not share a morphological base element but echoing through them there is a sparkle and glint, or a greenish golden glow!! Go to Websters Dictionary Appendix 1: Indo European Roots to discover more. After much dictionary delving, we discovered that these words share a common ancestor in the Proto Indo European root * ghel-(2) all with notions of slipperiness or shining!

We listed as many words we could quickly think of with the initial consonant cluster : glad, gitter, glisten, gleam, glimmer, gloaming, gleeful, glib, gloat, glitsch. The Online Etymology Dictionary indicated the much older Proto-Germanic root *glidan “to glide” and from there we were directed on to glidewhich is ‘probably part of the large group of Germanic words in gl- involving notions of “smooth shining joyful”. Glissando was ‘borrowed’ in 1873 from Italian which was derived from French glissant. The base element is an abbreviation from glissando, the slide and flow from one note to another. The base element in the word glissade is. Phoebe discovered that the verb glissade first appeared in 1832 from French glisser “to slip, slide”. As a verb it is intransitive (glissaded,glissading) ‘to perform a glissade’.( Chambers Dictionary) As a noun: ‘a sliding ballet step’ or ‘mountaineering – an act of sliding down a snowy or icy slope in a standing or squatting position, often with the aid of an ice axe’. As well as grenade you can see this fruity connection in garnet, and pomanders– the apple shaped balls filled with pot-pourri.

Pomegranate, the 14th century compound word, is etymologically ‘the many seeded apple’, being apple and “having grains,” from Latin granata’, its ultimate ancestor being Latin malum granatum.

Who would have thought the beautiful pomegranate could have been etymologically connected to a weapon of destruction? Certainly not Phoebe or me!Īyto tells us that the first grenades were spherical and with the wick on top, the explosive device ‘bore more than a passing resemblance to pomegranates.’ Old French pome grenate or just grenate altered to grenade under the influence of granada. Perhaps the most interesting of words with the suffix is grenade. Of Pomegranates and Grenades – a small diversion It forms nouns and carries the suggestion of movement and action or groups performing an action and is derived ‘ from Latin -atus, past participle suffix of verbs of the 1st conjugation to become in French’ (in Spanish -ado, Italian -ato) In English, we retain the Spanish form of desparado.ĭetail of Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pomegranate, 1487. We discovered that is a suffix from French. She analyzed this word as confirming the existence of the suffix with words such as lemonade, blockade, parade all before she turned to resources. She loves the way it glides on the tongue.

Etmyology of the word tremulous