The word feast is related to the word festival, and of these two words it is festival that has remained closer in meaning to the Latin source from which they both derive. This Latin source was the word festa, the name given by the ancient Romans to public celebrations, celebrations that did not necessarily involve food. Festa was borrowed by Old French as feste, which in turn was adopted by English at the beginning of the thirteenth century as the name of a sumptuous meal; by the fourteenth century, the word had acquired its current spelling, feast. English reborrowed the French feste\u2014or rather its Modern French form, fete\u2014in the mid eighteenth century and used it to signify a gala held to honour some worthy individual. A hundred years later, the Spanish equivalent, fiesta, was borrowed as a synonym for the much older festival, which had been current in English since the fourteenth century. Early on, feasts and festivals were associated with the many saints to whom the English once dedicated their churches. The most important of these feasts became known, in the early thirteenth century, as double feasts, that is, twice as “feasty” as the normal feasts; later on, in the fifteenth century, feasts were also divided into movable feasts (that is, the ones, like Easter, tied to the lunar cycle and whose date therefore changed from year to year) and immovable feasts (that is, the ones, like Christmas, tied to the solar cycle and therefore occurring on the same date every year).<\/p>\n
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The word feast is related to the word festival, and of these two words it is festival that has remained closer in meaning to the Latin source from which they both derive. This Latin source was the word festa, the name given by the ancient Romans to public celebrations, celebrations that did not necessarily involve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-f"],"yoast_head":"\n