This is the 300th episode of Friday words (!) and this week by coincidence is also a milestone birthday for me, so I’ve decided to change up the format a little bit. I’ve been exploring one new-to-me word and one fun-for-me etymology each week. Starting with this episode, I’m going to do either one or the other, or perhaps focus on a combination, and we’ll see how that goes.
So let’s get underway. This week’s word is prevenient, which I found yet again through a word-of-the-day source. Looking at it immediately made me wonder if it had any relationship to convenient.
To begin, prevenient means “coming before,” or alternatively, “antecedent.” It’s not a common word. Just for fun, I drilled down into the OED’s Frequency Bands. It’s in band 3 (out of 8, with 8 including the most common words). This band means that prevenient occurs between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern English. I’m not sure that numbers like this tell us much about it, but the gist is that although you don’t encounter it often, it’s “not overly opaque or obscure.”
Most of the examples I found had to do with theology, with many of the examples referring to the doctrine of prevenient grace. This doctrine emerged (as I understand it) from John Wesley and the Methodist belief that humankind is endowed with the [prevenient] grace that enables people to respond to the offer of salvation. (I’m no theologian, so don’t quote me on this.) But the word prevenient also occasionally shows up in legal texts (prevenient relations) or academic contexts (prevenient instruction).
The pre- of prevenient is a Latin root that means “before,” as in all those other pre- words, like preschool, prepay, prequel, pre-board, and pre-owned. The venient part, it turns out, is also Latin, from the verb venire, “to come.”
So yes, prevenient shares a root with convenient. Whereas prevenient is “come before,” convenient is “come with.” This sense led to a variety of flavors of “agreeing with” or “suitable” or “fitting.” For example, an older sense of convenient involved moral suitability, as in this OED example from 1684: “She sang and danc’d more exquisitely than was convenient for an honest woman.”
The venire root that gave us the venient in prevenient and convenient shows up all over the place:
- advent, adventure (ad, “to”)
- convene, convent, convention (con, “with”)
- event, eventual (ex, “out of”)
- intervene (inter, “between”)
- invention (in, “in”)
- prevent (pre, “before”)
- souvenir (sub, “below”)
All this investigation leads me to suspect that I won’t run across prevenient again anytime soon, but if I do, I will have this prevenient knowledge to draw on.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.