Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
If you observe Lent one year but don’t observe it the next, does that make you relentless? Did the avoidance of meat on Fridays during Lent make lentils the legume of choice? There’s a lot of lent going on here, which can lead a word-minded individual to wonder whether and how these words are related in some way. For those of you who aren’t giving up etymology for Lent, here are some answers:
Lent, the 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter, is a 13th-century shortening of Lenten, likely on the misapprehension that the -en was a suffix. Lenten traces back to the Old English lencten, which at heart just means “springtime,” and, much farther back in linguistic history, may even share a root with the words long and lengthen; springtime, after all, is when the days get longer.
The lentil — a legume, and also the seed of a legume, if you want to get technical — comes to English through Old French from the Latin lenticula, a diminutive of the Latin word lens, which is what Julius Caesar would have called the lentil plant.
If you take a look at a lentil, you’ll find that it’s roughly circular with a convex shape on opposite sides. If you imagine that shape made of glass, what have you got? A lens! It’s by analogy to the shape of the lentil that 17th-century experimenters landed on the word lens to describe the light-bending glass devices that make microscopes and telescopes work.
Relentless has a little more mystery to it. First, the -less is a common suffix meaning “without”; that leaves us with relent, a word on its own right that means “make less harsh, slacken, soften.” The re- is the common prefix that can mean “again” (rededicate, redraw) or “back, backward” (rebate, recede). But sometimes, in borrowings of much older words, the re- prefix appears to work simply to intensify the sense of the root word, or in some other sense that has been lost to time. Recommend and remain fall into this category, as does relent.
The Latin verb lentare means “soften, bend” (from lentus “slow, supple”), and somehow this came into Anglo-French with the prefix added, as relenter rather than just lenter. Which means that, today, something “showing no sign of reducing in strength or intensity” is relentless rather than just lentless.
And there you have it: four identical letters in three words with three completely different and unrelated histories. Yeah, English is weird sometimes.
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Comments
This is indeed fascinating, not the least of which lent really meaning springtime! As a child growing up in a Catholic household, my Mom took full advantage of the religion’s meaning to ‘give up’ things (saving money) during lent which ran from about Ash Wednesday through Easter Sunday.
If the reminders at the Catholic school weren’t enough with the nun bringing us into the adjacent church to look at stations of the cross, never mind the very large crucifix of Christ up front, Mom would take me too, separately, as a reminder of why we were suddenly ‘giving everything up’.
When she’d say “Look what He gave up and went through for you, young man,” it abruptly ended any further complaining for quite a while. Couldn’t argue with that one; no.