Curio
Today

miracle

MEER-uh-kuhl · noun

Origin

From Middle English miracle, borrowed from Old French miracle, from Latin mīrāculum ("object of wonder"), from mīror ("to wonder at"), from mīrus ("wonderful"), tracing back to Proto-Indo-European *(s)meyh₂- ("to smile, to be astonished").

This is Curio: one word's origin story, every morning. No feed, no backlog.

One short email each morning. Free; stop anytime. See a sample →

Journey

It came into English already carrying its sense of a wonder-inducing thing, and once in English it pushed aside much of the native word wundor, which had meant the same thing.

Related words

It's a doublet of milagro and miraculum — different paths from the same Latin root, mīrāculum.

More words

From Proto-Indo-European

Nearby, A–Z

All words A–Z →