Word of the Week

Welcome to Word a Week! Each week, we will be diving into the meanings, roots, and uses of words we use everyday, but may not know much about. Words, like anything, have a rich and interesting history that is always moving, changing, and being redefined. Let's learn about the history of what we use everyday –– language!

Ocean (ˈōSH(ə)n) 

The ‘deep.’ The ‘sea.’ La ‘mer.’ The word is used to mean a great body of water just as much as it is used to mean ‘a lot’ or ‘plenty.’ This word ‘ocean’ dates all the way back to a non-Proto-Indo-European word, said to have possibly come from a nomadic tribe in the Greek Islands, as some scholars say. Pre-Greek! Not many words in English are this old –– close to 5000 years in the making! The Greek borrowed their word during Classical antiquity and turned it into ‘okeanos,’ meaning ‘great river;’ probably referring to the Mediterranean. Centuries later, Latin picked up this word, but added to it. In Latin, we get ‘mare oceanum’ –– meaning ocean sea. This explains the French mer, the German meer, and would explain Grendel’s (the monster’s) hiding place in the 8th Century poem Beowulf — mere. The French developed the latter half of the Latin word into occean or oceanique, used in 1387 as occean Atlantyke. The English take the word in the same century without the second ‘c’ to be spelled, ocean.

One very interesting thing about this word is that although we know the path it took from Greece to our everyday lives, we actually do not know the true origin! We know that it is Pre-Greek, we know that the word did not come from Proto-Indo-European, but we don’t know much else. Scholars simply speculate about its further origin –– the most popular, of course, is the idea that the word stems from a nomadic, seafaring tribe. The world's history replicates what it reflects –– the ocean is mysterious, and its origin is too!

When thinking about historical mysteries, is there really any other word better than ‘ocean?’ Maybe during our next look at the water, we can think of all the different names this water has had, how it’s origin is unknown, and maybe we can appreciate this great enigma more than we did before.