I do the NYT crossword pretty regularly, and one of the benefits (if also frustrating in the moment) is that the puzzles sometimes involve words that are new to me. Not long ago, one of the puzzles introduced me to the word oniomania. The clue was this:
Oniomania, n. the uncontrollable desire to ________
I had no idea, so I had to consult the dictionary, which informed me that the word to fill in the blank was shop. As Deb Amlen wrote in the Wordplay column for that puzzle, “Today I Learned (TIL) that oniomania is the uncontrollable urge to SHOP, and not an excessive fondness for onions. Live and learn.”[1]
Well, me too. How does onio+mania relate to shopping? The stem onios is Greek from roots meaning “for sale” or “to buy.” This was combined with mania (“excessive excitement”), which is Latin. (As I mentioned before, people have occasionally objected to compound words that combine words from different languages, oh well.) Another term for oniomania is the possibly better known shopaholic.
Interestingly, we didn’t make up this word; we borrowed it. As it says in the OED, the word is “a borrowing from Greek, combined with an English element; modelled on a German lexical item.” The word Oniomanie appeared in German in 1892, and was translated (re-created? calqued?) in 1895 as oniomania. I would not have guessed that the word was that old.
An aside about -mania. The stem -mania feels like you could put a variety of terms in front of it to produce “excessive/uncontrollable enthusiasm for ____.” We have more than a dozen -mania terms; including familiar ones like egomania, pyromania, and kleptomania, which all follow the tradition of using classical word parts. The -mania stem is not as productive as -phobia, but I could create a word like moviemania or snackamania and those would be understood, I bet.
As another aside, I’ve certainly known people who seem to have had oniomania. It’s not something to be made light of.
Ok, origins. I recently wrote about vanilla, which comes from a kind of orchid. I also recently discovered the surprising and/or fun origin of the word orchid.
In English, the generic name orchid was a back-formation from the scientific name Orchideae, which Linnaeus assigned in the 1700s to the family of plants to which orchids belong. He of course got it from Latin, where the term orchis referred to various kinds of orchids. (The -d in orchid was a misinterpretation of the -d- in Orchideae, where it is not actually part of the stem.) I hadn’t realized that we also have the word orchis, which means the same as orchid, which goes back to the 1500s and which is still used today.
The Latin word orchis goes back to a similar Greek word, which the Greeks also used as the name of certain flowering plants. This is where it becomes more interesting: the Greek word orchis means “testicle”; the Greeks thought that the paired tubers of the plant looked like a pair of testicles. That seems to be true, certainly for some species of orchids:
Once I knew this, I was not surprised to learn that other names for certain types of orchids are bollock grass, bollockwort, and dogstones (where ballocks/bollocks is a British English word for testicles).
I also learned that there’s a term in medicine, orchiectomy or orchidectomy, whose meaning you can now guess. As Douglas Harper observes, this term was “coined by medical men in an attempt to avoid the common word castration.” I can see why a surgeon might want to use a term that’s a little less direct, I suppose.
I should note that while I was looking all of this up, I ran across many other writeups about how orchis means “testicle.” Apparently this is pretty well known. But as is always true here, I write up what I my own self have learned, and investigating these words always learns me plenty.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] The word oniomania also has a lot of vowels, which I’ve learned makes it attractive to crossword-puzzle authors. [^]