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.
When a thing appears or occurs quite infrequently — like a total solar eclipse, an albino wallaby, or a trip all the way across town without hitting a single red light — we call it rare, as in “infrequent.” While modern usage tends to indicate events widely spaced in time, the original sense of the root word focused on frequency in space.
The Latin rarus meant “widely spaced, thinly dispersed, sparse.” Its opposite wasn’t a word meaning “common,” but densus, root of the English word dense. In ancient Rome, one might use the word rarus to describe not a unique artifact or occurrence but a field in which seeds were planted rather far apart.
The original sense is more apparent in the relatively (ahem) rare word rarefy and its noun form rarefaction. Tracing to a combination of rarus and facere “to make,” both words refer to making something thinner; in practical use, the words are normally paired with air. The rarefied air at high altitudes is the reason Mount Everest climbers bring their own oxygen.
Rare, rarefaction, and their ilk all made the common trek from Latin to French to English.
The other place people often find something rare is at a steakhouse. A rare steak is one whose internal temperature only reaches 120-125° F, otherwise known as “20 degrees below the USDA safe minimum temperature.”
Is meat called rare because of the rarity of browned meat? Or is it because heat is relatively rare here? No, this form of rare comes from a completely different source: It’s a variant of rear, from Middle English rere, from Old English hrere. They all mean “lightly cooked” or “half-cooked.” From around 1650 to the mid-1800s, this type of rare primarily referred not to the cooking of meat but to soft-boiled eggs, and only more recently shifted into the meatosphere.
Rare is also a verb, most often appearing as a participle — someone “raring for” something or “raring to go” somewhere, indicating an eagerness. This, too, is its own word, etymologically unrelated to the other two. It’s a dialectal rendering of either roar (like a lion) or rear (like a horse).
Seeing a vegetarian rare for a rare steak is rare, and all three of those rares are etymologically unrelated.
Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now
