Words from New Latin
8 words in Curio passed through New Latin on their way into English.
About New Latin
Style of written Latin from the Renaissance onward · no native speakers today
Where
Italy → across northern Europe, later Scandinavia, Russia and eastern Europe
When
Speakers
No reliable count
No census of its speakers exists.
Family path
- Latin
- New Latin
- FrenchMiddle French
- English
Where it came from
New Latin, also called Neo-Latin, began in Italy during the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when scholars from Petrarch onwards promoted a Latin closer to that of the ancient Romans in grammar, style and spelling. It spread across northern Europe after about 1500 as part of the humanist movement, in line with its slogan ad fontes. The name is much younger, probably coined in Germany in the late eighteenth century as Neulatein.
Source: Wikipedia
Family
New Latin grew out of Latin.
The words, A to Z
- anesthesia
A word built entirely out of absence — the state of feeling nothing at all.
- biography
A word that literally means writing a life.
- critique
A word that came to English fully dressed, borrowed straight from French rather than reshaped along the way.
- encyclopedia
A book that once promised to walk you all the way around the circle of human knowledge.
- fuchsia
This vivid pink-purple color is named after a man, not a mood or a flower itself.
- lexicon
A word for the whole stock of words was itself once shorthand for a book.
- lithium
A metal light enough to float on water, named for the last thing you'd guess it was made of: rock.
- utopia
A perfect place that, by its very name, admits it exists nowhere at all.