BECAUSE NEH IS no, nekt is no light, or night. The Sanskrit word for night is nakta, the Hittite is nekuz, the Greek is nux and the Latin is nox. But the hidden meaning within nekt is darker than midnight: to the Stone Age mind, night didn’t just follow day, it murdered day.
Nek has survived as slang in English: knackered means worn out to the point of death, a knacker’s yard is an abattoir and, in north-east England, to knack is to hurt badly – if you stub your toe it’s painful, but if you break your foot it really knacks.
To the Romans, who knew a thing or two about it, nex was violent death. Internecine war is mutual destruction, when both sides are attempting the complete annihilation of the other. Internecion is a little-used word for a massacre, or pernicies in Latin: that became pernicious in English, meaning ruinous or fatal. The dictionary also lists pernicion, another little-used word for a massacre. Like the Inuit and their varied lexicon for snow, the Romans never tired of inventing words for mass slaughter.
Noxa in Latin meant harmful. It’s the root of noxious, meaning unwholesome, and obnoxious, which is something worse – reprehensible, offensive and probably illegal. In the Rat Pack slang of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, to be disgustingly drunk was to be obnoxicated – obnoxiously + intoxicated.
Nocent means guilty or harmful. It’s not much used, but its opposite is – innocent. Innocence isn’t always innocuous: sometimes naivety looks like silliness, and so a ninnocent gives us ninny. A persistent ninny becomes a nuisance.
In Athens, a corpse was nekros. A city full of corpses is a necropolis, and a magician who can communicate with them is a necromancer. Carrion birds, zombies and fashionable chefs who collect and cook roadkill are necrophagous. The process of decomposition and post-mortem decay is necrobiosis, though there is also necrosis, which is much worse – that’s when the flesh of a living creature starts to die and rot. If your doctor announced you were getting necrose, you’d be mortified … literally.
Nectar was the drink of the gods, because it conferred immortality; another word for it is ambrosia. Nowadays we think of nectar as honey – the origin of that is probably not its delicious sweetness but its antiseptic power, which wards off infection and death. Honey isn’t just good for sore throats; medieval medics used it as a poultice for infected cuts. The sweetest fruit is the nectarine.
Nox, the Latin for night, became nott and then natt in Norse, and neaht in Old English. Most of our night- words are matter-of-fact, like nightshirt or night-light, rather than morbid and portentious. The only really dark one is deadly nightshade, a name for belladonna, which has black, poisonous berries. Otherwise, for every nightwalker or street prowler, there is a night watchman; for every night-hag, riding the skies on a broomstick to dispense night terrors to children, there is the sweet song of the nightingale, and a nightcap for the grown-ups … not just the name for a stripy, tassled hat, but a snifter of brandy before bed.
A nocturne is a dreamy piece of music, but if it loses the final ‘e’, a nocturn is part of the liturgy called matins that monks sing and recite before dawn. Nocturnal animals are active at night, such as noctules, which are the biggest of British bats. Pernoctation is spending the night in prayer.
In Roman creation myths, the goddess Nyx was the daughter of Chaos. She married her brother Hell, or Erebus, and bore two children – Aether and Hemera (light, and day). If she had stopped there, the world might have been all right, but she also gave birth to Doom, Pain, Sorrow, Deceit, Strife, Blame and Old Age. Not content with that brood, she had two sets of triplets: the Furies, and the Parcae, who were apparently old women from the moment they were born. One held a distaff, wound round with all the human lives that were yet to begin; one had a spindle, with which she wove the threads of life into individual destinies; and one had a pair of scissors, which snipped short each life. Nyx rode in a chariot drawn by owls and bats, and carried two more children under her arms – Sleep and Death.
Don’t have nightmares.
NEM IS THE root of name, number and nomad, and the connection between those three concepts reveals a great deal about human societies when language was first developing.
To name a person or an object implies ownership: things that belong to no one are not worth naming. A baby, for instance, had to be given a name to define its allegiance to a family, a tribe or nationality, and probably a religion. That remains true today, with the legal and ritual significance of baptism and the birth certificate.
Most possessions are too numerous to be named individually, but must still be alloted to an owner. Vehicles are registered, luxury goods are insured, children’s clothes are name-tagged and so on. Tallying up our worldly goods is akin to naming them. Things don’t really count until they’ve been counted.
Nomadic herdsmen driving their cattle, goats or camels from one feeding ground to the next, were defined by their flocks. They had to know the exact number of their animals, and often branded them too, stamping a symbolic name on them. The word nomad comes from the Greek nomas, which means to roam in search of pasture.
The Greek for name was onoma. Onomatopoeic things make their own names, like splash and zap and twang – the -poeic suffix means making, and comes from the same root as poet, a maker of words. An onomasticon is a dictionary of names, and onomatology is the study of names. An onomancer can tell your fortune from the letters in your name.
Anyone without a name is anonymous, and with a false name is pseudonymous. Two things with the same name are synonymous. Antonomasia is calling someone by an epithet instead of their name – the Iron Lady for Margaret Thatcher, the Boss for Bruce Springsteen or the Little Tramp for Charlie Chaplin.
Homonyms are words that sound alike but are spelled differently, such as discreet and discrete. Heteronyms are the opposite: they sound different, they mean different things but they are spelled the same – live and live, for instance, or lead and lead.
Nomen was name in Latin. A nomenclature is a vocabulary; you’re holding a nomenclator – a book containing lists of words. The philosophy of nominalism denies the reality of objects as abstract concepts: only things that actually exist are worthy of the name. That’s typical of philosophers, to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator.
When we describe things by giving them names, whether we’re talking about scientific classification or merely the local landscape, that’s taxonomy. Like all words ending in -nomy, it comes from the Greek nomos, which means both a district and a law. An oikonomos ran a household and managed its finances – that’s the basis of economics. A metronome counts out time, and a gastronome lays down the law about food.
The French were particularly clever with names. A nom de plume was an author’s disguise, and a nom de guerre was a soldier’s. Both were protected from ignominy, or damage to their reputations. On the other hand, by revealing your real surname (in Old French, sour + nom, meaning onto the name), you might win renom – the repetition of your name by admirers, which gives us renown in English.
Numerare in Latin was to count. As well as numeral, it gives us supernumerary, which used to mean left over or surplus to numbers; these days, thanks to a touch of bureaucratic legerdemain, it means an employee who is not, strictly speaking, on the books but who can be called into action when required … one of many anomalies in the modern office. Nummary is dealing in coins, because numismatics is the study of money.
The Greek nemein means to distribute. Never slow when it came to handouts, the medieval English turned that into nimel, to take – though they had to be nimble to get anything. That was shortened to the slang nym, a thief. His nimbles were his light fingers. If the city guards laid hold of him, he’d met his Nemesis: she was the goddess of vengeance who distributed men’s fates. Like a dark angel, Nemesis had wings so that she could swoop down to mete out justice all the faster. One of her duties was to defend the memory of the dead from insults. Some accounts say that Nemesis, and not Leda, was the real mother of Helen of Troy … but that was probably a misnomer.
The past tense of nimel is nume, which means taken. Take away all feeling and we’re left numb. A numb hand, in Dickens’s London, was a clumsy oaf. Numskull is such a stupid word that it has lost its own ‘b’. What a dimwit … a real numby … not deserving of any other name.
EARLY INDO-EUROPEAN SPEAKERS counted in tens, as we do. Their names for numbers have changed little as new languages evolved: look how similar the French un deux troix or the German ein zwei drei are to oino dwoyh trih. That suggests Neolithic man understood the concept of an abstract number system, in which ten could mean ten horses, or ten humans, or ten anything. It would be thousands of years, however, before Indian mathematicians started to write down the decimal system, and so took the credit for inventing it. When counting was first invented, very early in the Stone Age, man probably counted in fours, at least up to twelve – that’s why eleven and twelve have their unique names, whereas thirteen, fourteen and so on are really three-and-ten, four-and-ten, etc. According to this theory, we counted on our fingers (not using our thumbs) up to eight, and then began again, which explains why newn, the word for nine, is also the word for new … and why novem, the Latin nine, is so much like novel.
One is one and all alone, which is another way of saying lonely. If you have just one apple, you have an apple; the indefinite article in English was always ‘an’ until about 1200 AD, when it was shortened to a in front of words that began with a consonant. If you eat the apple, of course, you’ll have none – you won’t have any. And if the apple wasn’t yours in the first place, you’ll have to atone for your theft: atone is a contraction, meaning to reconcile or put things at one. You’ll only do that the once. In Latin, one is unus, which gives us unity, the universe, unisex hairdressers and the unicycle.
Two is double, though it’s also written as twain – and twain ten is twenty. The Greeks made it di, which is why anything cut in two is divided; the Latin prefix changed ‘d’ to ‘b’, making bi, which gives us bisected. We can thank the Greeks for diverse, different and diploma (which originally meant a paper folded double; see plak). The Romans, on the other hand, gave us bipeds, bigamy and binary numbers. Computers measure information in bits, which is an elision of binary digit. The Latin for two retained the ‘d’, though: it was duo, as in duplicate, duplicitous and dubious, meaning in two minds.
Three is the trinity, the triangle and the triple word score. It becomes thirteen and thirty, and – as Frankie Howerd used to say – ‘nay, thrice nay!’ In Latin, trih became ter, as in tercentenary, which is the 300th anniversary, and tercet, or three lines of poetry with one rhyme. Roman falconers believed the third egg in a nest would always hatch a male chick, which is why tercel means a male hawk. The Norse word for a third part of any land, from a field to a country, was a thriding: Yorkshire, which was governed by the Danes 1,200 years ago, was divided into North Thriding, East Thriding and South Thriding. The words were run together, until the county consisted of three ridings, which has nothing to do with horses.
At first kwetwor looks little like four, but it is a lot like tetra (the Greek four was tettera) and quite a lot like quad (the Latin four was quattuor). Quarters are fourth parts but also the lodgings of soldiers or the cabins of sailors; to be given quarter was a stay of execution, but quartering was hacking the arms and legs from a victim. A tetrapolis is a region containing four cities, each ruled by a tetrarch; a tetraglot speaks four languages; a tetralogy is a set of four plays, three tragic and the last a satire; a tetrapod is an animal with four feet (unlike a tripod, which is a camera stand). In Old English, anything divided into quarters consisted of feorthungs, which became farthings: in pre-decimal coinage, a farthing was a tiny coin, much smaller than the old penny – hence the penny-farthing, a bicycle with one huge front wheel and one miniature wheel behind.
It’s hard to see the connection straight away between penke and five, even when the ‘p’ shifts to ‘f’. But ‘fenke’ is very like finger, and of course there are five of them (counting the thumb) on each hand. It’s obvious where the Romans got their quinque, written as V. In a quincunx, five objects are arranged in a square, four at the corners and one at the centre, like the spots on dice. Quentin was traditionally the name of a fifth son, and the quinquagesima were the fifty days before Easter. The Greek five was pente, which gives us the five-sided US government building, the fiftieth day after Easter, the first five books of the Bible and a Roman slave galley with fifty oars – Pentagon, Pentecost, Pentateuch and penteconter.
Noon, the sixth hour after sunrise, in Latin is the sexta hora, when Mediterranean folk sensibly choose to have a siesta. The Roman sex (we politely pronounce it as six) gives us sextant, an astronomical tool that can measure angles of up to 60 degrees; semester, which now means an academic term but originally referred to sex menstris or six months; and the Sistine Chapel, so called because it was Pope Sixtus IV who began building at the Vatican palace in 1473. Six in Greek was hex, and a hexagram is a six-pointed star – a favourite symbol of witches, who could use it to put a hex on victims. Insects, being six-footed, are categorised as hexapods.
September, unhelpfully, is the ninth month of the year; it used to be the seventh, until Augustus Caesar inserted a couple of extras … August, named after himself, and July, after his predecessor Julius. A river that splits and flows into seven branches is septemfluous; the Nile is a famous example, the River Lea on the Essex border a lesser one. The seven stars of the Plough in astronomy are the septentrions, because septem triones is Latin for the seven plough-oxen. The Greek hepta gives us heptarch, the seventh king. A heptad is a group of seven things, such as days in a week, and anything divided into seven parts is heptamerous. Logically, if you were ‘heptamorous’, you’d have sex once a week, but English isn’t logical and the word doesn’t exist.
Eight comes from the Old English eahta, which comes from the Old Saxon ahto, that is still some distance from the original okto. The Greeks and the Romans, on the other hand, didn’t change it at all, which is why the octopus has eight legs, the octangle has eight sides, an octastyle building has eight columns and octogamy is having eight wives. An octave is a full musical scale of eight notes, but it is also an ecclesiastical word meaning an eight-day festival, and the name of a wine cask that holds an eighth of a pipe, which is 105 gallons (about 477 litres), or two hogsheads. Simple mathematics will tell you that this means there are four octaves to a hogshead. Yma Sumac, known as the Peruvian songbird, became famous in the 1950s for her four-octave vocal range; she claimed to be an Inca princess, and wore spectacular headdresses, though never an actual hogshead. In South America, there’s a rat-like rodent called the octodon, because it has eight teeth.
If you’re dressed up to the nines, you are in your finest clothes – perhaps a reference to an eighteenth-century proverb, that ‘nine tailors make a man’. Nineteen was the average age of US conscripts fighting in the Vietnam War, according to the intoned lyrics of a number-one hit by Paul Hardcastle in 1985. The Australian butcherbird, a sort of magpie, is known as the nine-killer because it catches insects and small lizards and impales them on thorns to impress its mate, often nine at a time. Nona hora, the church service traditionally held at 3pm or the ninth hour after dawn, was moved back to midday in the Dark Ages. Confusingly, 12 o’clock became non and then noon.
Decem is the Latin ten: hence decimal, decade and decimate, which was the Roman punishment of slaughtering every tenth soldier in a legion that had mutinied or shown cowardice. A decuria was ten men, and by the Middle Ages in England a dicker was ten fleeces or hides; dickering was bartering, perhaps trying to get an extra one thrown in for free. A decima was a tenth part, which is why anyone who looked like they could afford to give a starving man ten cents during the Depression of the 1930s was begged, ‘Brother, can you spare a dime?’ The Ten Commandments are sometimes referred to as the Decalogue, and the hundred tales written down by Boccaccio in the fourteenth century and supposedly told by ten people over ten days are the Decameron.
Philologists, who study language, divide Indo-European tongues into two groups: the ones that have a soft ‘s’ name for 100 such as satem in Sanskrit, and the hard ‘k’ languages that include Latin with centem. It’s typical of philologists to pick a key word that makes a useless example because, although the Romans said ‘kentem’ with a hard ‘k’, it arrived in English as centem with a soft ‘s’ in words like century, percentage and centigrade. The Greeks made matters worse by changing kentm to hekaton – that’s why a hectare is 100 ares, an ‘are’ being 100 square metres. A hectograph was an early carbon-paper device, invented in 1869, which could print multiple copies, though the name was an advertising gimmick: it couldn’t manage 100 at a time. A hecatomb, now meaning the sacrifice of many victims, was once the slaughter of 100 oxen to appease the gods.