The ten entries listed in this chapter are all derived from some root word meaning ‘light’, in the sense of brightness or lustre. Found as leoht in Old English, light itself has more than 200 different derivations in the Oxford English Dictionary, and is the source of a great many more idiomatic phrases and expressions. To see the light, for instance, meaning to ‘understand’ or ‘realize’, dates from the seventeenth century; to see something in a good or bad light is a sixteenth-century expression, as is to stand in someone’s light, meaning to rob someone of their enjoyment of something; whilst to come to light, meaning to ‘emerge’ or be ‘revealed’, is almost as old as the word light itself, and is recorded in an Old English text dating from the tenth century.
The adjective antelucan relates to the hours immediately before dawn, and is typically used in relation to religious practices or services. Dating from the mid-seventeenth century in English, the word is derived directly from its Latin equivalent antelucanus, which is formed from a compound of the preposition ante, meaning ‘before’ or ‘in front of’ (as in antemeridian and antechamber), and lux, the Latin word for ‘light’.
Developed in the eighteenth century, an aphengescope is a ‘magic lantern’, a type of projector uniquely capable of producing enlarged images of solid objects, rather than simply shining a light through a transparency. First mentioned in English in the 1860s, like other lanterns of this type the aphengescope worked by shining a light or series of lights on to a non-transparent object, with a complex series of mirrors and lenses used to project and focus a larger image of the object on to a nearby screen. The word itself is coined from a series of Greek roots, principally the prefix a-, denoting an absence or lack of something, and phengos, meaning ‘light’ or ‘lustre’.
The word éclair was first recorded in English in an article in New York’s Vanity Fair magazine as early as 1861. A derivative of the French verb éclairer, meaning ‘to shed light on’ or ‘to brighten’ – which is in turn taken from the Latin verb exclarare, meaning ‘to light up’ or ‘to make clear’ – éclair is actually the French word for a flash of lightning, although quite how this name came to be applied to a choux pastry finger is something of a mystery.
Fantasy first appeared in English in the early fourteenth century, when it was originally used to refer to a mental image of an object or to the mental capacity by which such an image is formed. Over time, the word developed a number of other meanings and senses including a hallucination or apparition (1300s), a desire (late 1300s), a speculation (mid-1400s), imagination (1500s) and, more recently, a daydream exploring a person’s desires (1920s), and a literary genre featuring imaginary and otherworldly characters and creatures (1940s). The word itself is thought to have entered English from French yet originally derives from the Latin phantasia, meaning ‘imagination’ or ‘apparition’, and in turn the Greek phantos, meaning ‘to show in light’ or ‘to make visible’, which is itself a derivation of the Ancient Greek word for ‘light’, phos.
The word illustration – along with a handful of similar terms like lustre and illustrious – is derived from the Latin verb lucere, meaning ‘to shine’, and ultimately lux, the Latin word for ‘light’. On its first appearance in the language in the mid-fifteenth century, illustration meant ‘enlightenment’ or ‘illumination’, specifically of the mind or spirit, before its meaning developed to come to refer to any clarifying or elucidating factor (1500s), then to the act of making something distinctive (1600s), and lastly, in the early 1800s, to a pictorial embellishment used to explain or enhance a text.
The Koh-i-noor is a magnificent 186-carat, 37 g diamond unearthed in the Andhra Pradesh region of eastern India sometime before the sixteenth century. First mentioned in English in the 1700s, in India the Koh-i-noor has been traced back to texts dating from the mid-1500s and is believed to have a name meaning ‘mountain of light’ in Ancient Persian. The diamond has been held in the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom from the reign of Queen Victoria onwards. In the years since it was first brought to Britain in the nineteenth century the word koh-i-noor has gained both a general meaning in English referring to any similarly large or garish stone, and a figurative meaning referring to anything considered the best or most superb of its kind.
Dating from the seventeenth century, the verb lucubrate is today generally taken to mean to ‘write in a scholarly manner’, implying that the writer has carried out a great deal of laborious research or else has gone into an unnecessarily elaborate amount of detail; a lucubration is another word for an extensive and well-informed written work. The earliest and most literal meaning of the word, however, is to ‘work by artificial light’, with the implication that the lucubrator would work long into the night on their studies. The word is derived from its Latin equivalent lucubrare, which is ultimately descended from the Latin word for ‘light’, lux.
Eurasian lynx were native to Great Britain until they were hunted to extinction in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the creatures were widely known in the Middle English period and are recorded in the language as early as the mid-fourteenth century. The word lynx itself was adopted into the language via Latin, and is ultimately descended from the creature’s Ancient Greek name lunx, which is in turn believed to be a form of the Greek leukos, meaning ‘white’ or ‘light’, presumably referring to the cat’s distinctively reflective eyes.
The discovery of phosphorus (P), chemical element number 15, in the mid-seventeenth century is credited to the German alchemist Hennig Brand, who produced a glow-in-the-dark phosphate compound, ammonium sodium hydrogen phosphate, by boiling and distilling his own urine in his Hamburg laboratory in 1669; phosphorus was the first chemical element discovered in modern times. Brand called the light-emitting substance he discovered phosphorus mirabilis, the ‘miraculous bearer of light’, deriving its name from the Greek words for ‘light’, phos, and ‘to bring’ or ‘to carry’, phero. In English, however, the first recorded use of the word phosphorus was not in reference to the element but rather as a proper noun, Phosphorus, which was used as an alternative name for the Morning Star by astronomers in the late sixteenth century.
The word radius has a variety of different meanings and usages in English, the earliest of which is as the name of the shorter of the two bones of the human forearm, first described in English in the mid-1500s. Amongst the word’s many other meanings, however, are the fin of a fish or ray; the arm of a starfish; a device used to measure the altitude of the sun or a star; the upright post or shaft of a wooden cross; the area within which something operates; a line joining the centre of a circle to the circumference; and, similarly, the spoke of a wheel. The word itself comes from the identical Latin word radius, which, amongst a similarly large group of meanings, could also be used to refer to a ray of light.