Carpe Verbum
I was watching a show recently in which they used the term per diem. I honestly hadn’t heard that expression, but even if I hadn’t taken highschool Latin, I could tell that it means “per day”. I knew what diem meant because of the well-known Latin phrase carpe diem, which means “seize the day”.
I wondered though, did diem ever find itself into English words, or was it merely destined for use in Latin phrases?
I decided to do some research. My first mistake is that the Latin root is dies. Diem is the accusative case in the 5th declension. I perused word lists without any luck, but finally after some seriously googling I found what I was looking for.
nudiustertian - this has to be one of the best words that I’ve never heard. It means “the day before yesterday”, and comes from a combination of words literally meaning “now is the third day”. Isn’t that beautiful? Unfortunately this one will probably never appear on the GRE or SAT. It isn’t even in Webster’s. I could only find it in the Oxford dictionary.
meridian - used to mean “midday”, as a combination of medius (mid) and dies (day).
journey - you wouldn’t know by looking at it, but this one came to us from Latin to French to English and literally means “a day’s trip”.
diet - a found an explanation of this one here, although etymologists aren’t positive that they’re related.
dismal - from dies mali, literally “evil days”.
diurnal - I’ll leave you with this one, which might actually appear on the GRE or SAT. It means “during the day”, or “daily”.
Tags: dismal, diurnal, GRE, Latin, meridian, nudiustertian, SAT
August 17th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
March 22nd, 2010 at 3:13 pm
I was watching a show recently in which they used the term per diem…..
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