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Topic: Stupor & stupid

Sometimes even the most obvious word connections can lead to surprising links in our lexicon. Take a question about stupor and stupid. As you might have guessed, those terms share an ancestor, and that ancestor gave our lexicon plenty of other terms.

The Latin stupere means "to be benumbed, be astonished, be stupefied." A noun-derivative of stupere traveled from Latin into Middle English, where it appeared in the 14th century as stupor, "a condition of greatly dulled or completely suspended sense or sensibility." It took another century before the verb stupefy entered English. Influenced by Middle French, the immediate source of the English word, stupefy actually has ancestry in the Latin stupefacare: stupere (which you'll remember means "to be benumbed; astonished; stupefied"); plus facere, meaning "to make." Not surprisingly, stupefy entered English with the sense "to make physically stupid, dull, or insensible; benumb."

It wasn't until the 16th century that the adjective stupid made its way into English, followed, in the next century, by another adjective, stupendous.

But we'll bet one long-ago relation of stupere leaves you stupefied: type. It turns out the Latin ancestor of stupor, stupefy, stupid, and stupendous is akin to a Greek word meaning "to strike; beat;" and which is the ancestor of the verb type.

Questions or comments? Write us at wftw@aol.com Production and research support for Word for the Wise comes from Merriam-Webster, publisher of language reference books and Web sites including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

So my typing could actually stupefy someone... lol