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.
The United States’ 250th anniversary is fast approaching, and short-term fireworks stores are popping up all over. A 250th anniversary is also called a semiquincentennial, and though it’s a word, these seven syllables of Latinate goodness are secretly a mathematical formula. Here’s how the word breaks down, starting from the end.
The -ennial part of semiquincentennial comes from annus, Latin for “year.” Without annus — which rhymes with “fan us” and not, well, you get the picture — we wouldn’t have the words annual, anniversary, perennial, annuity, millennium, and a slew of other year-related words. (The shifts between a and e come down to esoteric Latin morphological rules.)
Once we’ve got “year” in there, the math truly begins: Cent comes from centum “100.” I wrote about this and listed a number of related “cent” words in my 100th In a Word column in 2020. Put these together and you get centennial, marking 100 years. I should note here that centennial existed for a while primarily as an adjective (as in “a centennial celebration”); it didn’t take off as noun until 1876, which language purists then would have called the nation’s centenary.
English has a word-forming part that means “one-and-a-half,” sesqui-; the nation’s sesquicentennial — marking one-and-a-half hundred years — was in 1926. We don’t, however, have a similar sequence that means “two-and-a-half,” so we must approach the 250th anniversary from a different angle.
Quin- (as in quintuplets) comes from quinque, “five.” Quin– + –cent– + –ennial = 5 x 100 years. So a quincentennial indicates something lasting 500 years, but that’s twice what we need.
The semi (e.g., semicircle, semifinal) is from a Latin word for “half.” Which means that, from left to right, semiquincentennial is ½ x 5 x 100 years. Do the math, and you get 250 years.
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