Celo
Published: 2021-11-20The English words “cell” (or “cellar”) and “ceil” seem to have something to do with each other, but I didn’t know how exactly they are related. Actually, they come from the Latin word “cēlō”1, meaning “I hide or I cover”.
This is totally understandable, since these nouns, cell, cellar, and ceil, can be considered as something that helps us to physically hide. Just to be clear, a cell often refers to a small room in a prison, and a cellar means a room below ground level in a house2. Both are very useful for us to hide in.
There are two English words related to the meaning “hide” not in a physical sense: conceal and occult. The former consists of the prefix “con-“, which indicates completeness or emphasis, and cēlō. The latter, with the prefix “ob-“3 meaning “towards”, means “relating to mysterious or supernatural powers” (hidden from understanding).
I thought that the Latin “celer”, meaning “fast”, must ultimately have come from the same origin. According to Wiktionary, celo comes from the Proto-Indo-European “*ḱel-“4, while celer comes from the Proto-Indo-European “*kel-“5. They look very similar, but of course they have different letters6.
English words that come from celer include “accelerate” and “celerity” (swiftness of movement. archaic).
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For the word “ceil”, there are other suggested hypotheses. One of them is that it comes from the Latin “caelum” meaning “sky”, from which the basic French word “ciel” meaning “sky” comes. ↩
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The Japanese ワインセラー (derived from “wine cellar” and pronounced almost the same way) does not necessarily correspond to the English “wine cellar”, since ワインセラー sometimes just refers a wine closet (just google them to find out). ↩
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The prefix “ob-“ usually becomes “oc-“ before the letter “c” (e.g. “occur”). ↩
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_phonology#Consonants ↩