Vocabulary Blog

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

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 4:17 pm and is filed under words. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.