Foreign words have sometimes contributed more to English than their native English counterparts. For example, the Old English etan, meaning to eat, contributed a mere two words to Modern English: it evolved into eat and gave rise to art, an almost defunct word that literally means not eaten. In contrast, the Latin edere is the direct source of edible but it is also\u2014via its past participle form, esus, meaning eaten\u2014the source of comestible, semese, and obese. These last three words are distinguished by their prefixes. With comestible, the com represents the Latin prefix cum, signifying completely, and thus comestible literally means completely eaten; since the early nineteenth century, however, the word has been used as a jocular synonym for food. With semese, the sem represents the Latin prefix semi, meaning half, and thus semese means half-eaten. With obese, the ob signifies away and therefore obese literally means eaten away. Surprisingly, the word obese\u2014or rather its Latin source, obesus\u2014was once used to describe an extremely skinny person, one “eaten away” by hunger. Eventually, however, obesus flipped its perspective and came to describe someone who appeared to have “eaten away” everything he could lay his hands on. As a result, the original meaning of the Latin obesus (skinny) is the opposite of what its English derivative, obese, now means (fat, corpulent, having only a distant memory of one’s toes). The oldest in this cluster of words is eat, first recorded in the ninth century; ort and comestible followed in the mid fifteenth century, edible and obese in the mid seventeenth century and semese in the mid nineteenth century.<\/p>\n
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Foreign words have sometimes contributed more to English than their native English counterparts. For example, the Old English etan, meaning to eat, contributed a mere two words to Modern English: it evolved into eat and gave rise to art, an almost defunct word that literally means not eaten. In contrast, the Latin edere is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e"],"yoast_head":"\n