Language of Confusion: Ire

This word is prolific. Surprisingly so.

Ire showed up in the fourteenth century and comes from the Old French ire, which means ire. Stop me if I’m going too fast. Before that it was the classical Latin ira, which…yeah, means wrath, so no big leaps here. Ire can be traced all the way back to the Proto Indo European word eis-, which is, like, everywhere. And don’t go thinking that the name Ira is related, because it’s not. The name Jerome is, though!

Also related is irate. It’s way recent, having shown up in 1838, making it less than two hundred years old. It comes from the classical Latin iratus, angry, which of course comes from the above mentioned ira. Other words that are in this family include irascible, which showed up in the late fourteenth century from the Old French irascible and Late Latin irascibilis and classical Latin irasci, also a word for angry and also from ira.

But let’s look back at eis-. It’s also the origin word for the Greek hieros, sacred, which spawned hieroglyphikos, the word that gave us hieroglyph. Also related is hierarchy, which showed up in the late fourteenth century as jerarchie/ierarchie (yes, a J, but I assume it was pronounced as a Y here). It’s from the Old French ierarchie and Medieval Latin hierarchia, the ranked division of angels. And I assume that you’ve figured out that hierarchia comes from hiero.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

Omniglot

University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

University of Texas at San Antonio’s page on Proto Indo European language

Dictionary of Medieval Latin