I think most places in the US this summer have experienced periods of extreme heat. Even here in Seattle, where the comfort range for most residents is roughly between 70 and 72 degrees (F), we had several days under a “heat dome” where it broke 100 degrees and records[1]. (And a lot of? most? people in Seattle don’t have residential air conditioning.)
I mention this because Words Friend Tim introduced me the other day to an appropriate word: estivate (aestivate outside the US). A straightforward though boring definition is “sleep during summer.” A more evocative definition—and one that seems more suitable to the experience of this summer—is “to pass the summer in a state of torpor or dormancy.” As Tim noted when he sent me the word, “It’s boiling hot in Texas, hence it came to mind.”
Estivate is a term from zoology, where it’s used to describe the behavior of certain animals. For example, some turtles, tortoises, and salamanders estivate at the hottest part of the year. The water-holding frog in Australia creates a kind of cocoon that stores water and then buries itself in soil in order to (a)estivate while waiting out the hot, dry period.
If the word estivate and the sense of “sleeping during summer” feels sorta-kinda familiar, that’s because there’s a related word that you almost surely know: hibernate. (Tim pointed out this relationship to me as well, saving me from the “wait, isn’t that like …?” question I would have had.) To hibernate of course means to sleep during winter, like bears do.
While I was looking up the definitions of these terms, I glanced at the etymologies, which made everything clear. Estivate comes ultimately from the Latin word for summer (aestas), and hibernate comes from the Latin word for winter (hiems). Neat, huh? Even better when you realize that these words show up in French as l’été (“summer”) and l’hiver (“winter”).
On to real origins for this week. I recently read the book Americanon, in which the author, Jess McHugh, discusses 13 books from American history that helped shaped our thinking about what it means to be American. The first book in her list is The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which has been published continuously since 1792. McHugh credits this book with helping to “build a mythic narrative around the American farmer as the model citizen,” a doctrine that is still very much with us.
While I was reading this, and as you might guess, I got to wondering where the word almanac came from. A lot of words in English that begin with al- come from Arabic: alchemy, alcohol, alcove, algebra, algorithm, alkali. Is that true for almanac as well?
Well … maybe. We in English got the word from French, that much seems clear. In late Latin, the word almanac was used to refer to a set of tables that recorded the movements of the planets. Per the OED, it’s possible that the word goes back through Spanish to Arabic al-manakh, meaning “calendar.” They spend a fair bit of time reviewing this theory and speculating about what the root manakh might have meant, perhaps something like “stopping place” or “place of residence.”
A problem with this theory is that although Arabic-speaking scientists in medieval times had words for astronomy tables, none of those words were almanac. As one source says, “To have the right to argue that [the word] is of Arabic origin, one must first find a candidate word in Arabic.”
An intriguing idea is that French astronomers created the word to be Arabic-looking. As the source says, “Arabic astronomy was held in high esteem in the Latin West during the time of emergence of the word.” At that time, medieval Europe was rediscovering earlier learning, like that of the Greeks, and some of that learning was transmitted through Arabic. For example, Ptolemy’s Syntaxis Mathematica, an influential treatise on math and astronomy, came into Europe as the Almagest, a Latin translation from Arabic (al-majisti).
It’s therefore possible that when some medieval astronomers used the word almanac, they were borrowing some scientific cred by using an Arabic-ish title for what they were working on. This is a familiar approach to us now, of course; in English, a vast number of scientific and technical words are based on Greek and Latin roots, rather than on good ol’ English/Germanic ones.
Most dictionaries stick with the explanation that almanac comes from Arabic al-manakh. So if someone challenges you to cite the etymology of almanac, that’s your better bet. But keep this second theory handy, just in case.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.