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WonderWord origin

The Latin verb scire, 'to know', sits behind a surprising family of English words: science, conscience, omniscient, prescient. The odd relative is nice. It comes from nescius, 'not knowing', and when it entered English in the late 1200s it meant foolish or ignorant.

Etymology

LanguageScience

The story behind the card

Science first meant simply knowledge of any kind, from Latin scientia. The narrower sense, the study of nature by observation and experiment, came later, and the word 'scientist' was coined only in 1833, by the English scholar William Whewell. Conscience comes from conscientia, 'knowing with', which could mean knowledge shared with others or knowledge held within oneself. Omniscient adds omnis, 'all', and prescient adds prae, 'before'. Nescius is simply ne-, 'not', joined to the same verb, so 'nice' began life as the opposite of 'science'. Turkish has a similar family built on its own verb for knowing, bil-: bilgi (knowledge) and bilge (wise) are old words, while bilim (science) and bilinç (consciousness) were coined during the language reform of the 1930s.

Türkçe oku
Latince scire “bilmek” demektir. İngilizcedeki science (bilim), conscience (vicdan), omniscient (her şeyi bilen) ve prescient (önceden sezen) bu fiilden gelir. En beklenmedik akraba ise “nice”: “Bilmeyen” anlamındaki nescius'tan türemiştir ve 13. yüzyılın sonunda İngilizceye girdiğinde “aptal, cahil” demekti.

Science, Latincede “bilgi” demek olan scientia'dan gelir ve önceleri her türlü bilgiyi anlatıyordu. Doğayı gözlem ve deneyle incelemek anlamı sonradan gelişti; “scientist” (bilim insanı) sözcüğünü İngiliz bilgin William Whewell ancak 1833'te türetti. Conscience (vicdan), “birlikte bilme” anlamındaki conscientia'dan gelir; bu sözcük hem başkalarıyla paylaşılan bilgiyi hem de insanın kendi içinde taşıdığı bilgiyi anlatabiliyordu. Omniscient'ta omnis (“her şey”), prescient'ta prae (“önce”) vardır. Nescius da aynı fiilin başına olumsuzluk bildiren ne- önekinin gelmesiyle oluşur; yani nice, doğuşunda science'ın tam karşıtıydı. Türkçede de benzer bir aile bil- fiilinden türer: Bilgi ve bilge eski sözcüklerdir; bilim ve bilinç ise 1930'lardaki Dil Devrimi sırasında türetildi.

Sources and further reading

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Algebra takes its name from al-jabr, a word in the title of a textbook written in Baghdad around 820 by the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His own name, turned into Latin as Algoritmi, gave us the word algorithm.

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A Christian prayer book finished in 1229 hides lost works by Archimedes. Its maker scraped the ink from a 10th-century copy of his writings and wrote the prayers over it.

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Serendipity, the knack of finding good things by chance, is a word the English writer Horace Walpole coined in a 1754 letter. He took it from a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes kept discovering, 'by accidents and sagacity', things they were not looking for.

Walpole, son of the prime minister Robert Walpole and later author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, used the word on 28 January 1754 in a letter to his friend Horace Mann, the British envoy in Florence. He had just found something he needed, by chance, in an old book. Serendip is an old name for Sri Lanka, and the tale reached Europe through an Italian version of 1557 based on the Persian poet Amir Khusrau. The word stayed rare until the 20th century. Today it describes discoveries that need both luck and a sharp eye, as when Alexander Fleming noticed in 1928 that a mould had killed the bacteria on a culture plate, the observation that led to penicillin.

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Next card in the archive'Nice' comes, through French, from Latin nescius, 'not knowing'. When it entered English around 1300 it meant foolish or ignorant, and it passed through senses such as timid, fussy and precise before 'pleasant' became established in the 18th century.Read next →