Monday, April 18, 2016

A-to-Z Challenge: O

Today’s word: order. No fancy introductions today. Except this.


Order showed up in the early thirteenth century, the verb deriving from the noun, which meant a religious order in particular. It comes from the Old French ordre/ordene, position, rule, or religious order. Before that, it was the classical Latin ordinem, which pretty much just means order. The Romans actually took it from the Italian root word ord-, arrange, which is interesting because usually when they stole words it was from Greek. And not Italy. Where the seat of the Empire was.

Sources

11 comments:

  1. Maybe they just felt like robbing Italy that day.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I love the word order - I'm a very orderly person (except for when I'm being disorderly).

    ReplyDelete
  3. I tend to think of arrange as more benign than order.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm all out of order; I guess I need to go shopping.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Darn Romans always stealing stuff! ;)

    ~Ninja Minion Patricia Lynne aka Patricia Josephine~
    Story Dam
    Patricia Lynne, Indie Author

    ReplyDelete
  6. That is a pretty direct lineage to a word, for a change.

    Susan Says

    ReplyDelete
  7. I guess a lot of words come from religion. Most societies have religion and it's usually pretty central to the society, so it makes sense.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Clearly the Romans knew not to steal from home :) Either that or they just thought Greek was posher.
    Tasha
    Tasha's Thinkings | Wittegen Press | FB3X (AC)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Here from Alex's place...Having reading backwards I learned a lot.

    ReplyDelete

Please validate me.