Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 4; July 03

The History of Six Words

Level : Upper Intermediate to Advanced
Time : 15 to 20 minutes

Preparation

Copy the etymological explanations below and cut them into sets of six.

In class

1. Group the students in sixes. Give each set of six students the set of six definitions. Each person takes one, reads it and gets it under his belt, so he can fluently reproduce the information.

2. Get people in each group of six to tell the others about the history of their word. The task of each six is to discover what the words have in common.

3. Do a brief round-up with the whole class of what the words historically share.

The History of Six Words

apocalypse:

now means catastrophe or end of the world, and has done for the past 100 years or so. Before that it meant Revelation of St John the Divine.The meaning revelation came from the Greek via Old French and Church Latin. The Greek verb apokaluptein means to un (apo) cover/hide (kaluptein).

cell:

this word comes from the Indo-European base kel from which clandestine and occult also derive. It came into English via Old French from the Latin cella, meaning small room, storeroom, inner room of a temple. Until the 14th century it meant small subsidiary monastery and then began to mean a monk's room. Its biological meaning is first recorded in the 17th century and prison cell is late 18th century.

occult:

comes from the past participle of the Latine verb occulere, which means to hide. The word came into English with its Latin meaning, hidden. concealed and did not modify into its current meaning until the 17th century.

hall:

meaning a roofed or covered place, derives from germanic khallo, which itself derives from khel, meaning hide or cover. In Old English heall meant a large, roof-covered place. Gradually two new meanings appeared: large residence and big public room. The idea of the hall as an entrance corridor dates from the 17th century

conceal:

comes from the Old French conceler that in turn comes from the Latin verb concelare, an emphatic form of celare, meaning to hide. Behind this lies the Indo-European root kel = hide.

hell:

etymologically is a hidden place and goes back to the Indo-European root kel. In Germanic, the Indo-European kel becomes khel and khal. Khal leads to the modern word hall, while khel becomes hell. Both a hall and the Devil's place are conceived of as hidden or covered places.

Acknowledgement

The definitions are according to John Ayto in Dictionary of Word Origins, Bloomsbury, 1999.