Earth & SkyGreek → English
Abyss
/əˈbɪs/noun
A depth too great to measure, whether a physical gulf or a moral one.
The Greek roots
ἀ-
a-
not, without
βυσσός
byssós
bottom, depth
Literally: “bottomless”
The story of the word
In Greek ἄβυσσος was an ordinary adjective meaning bottomless, applied to the sea. The translators of the Septuagint used it for the Hebrew tehom, the primeval deep of Genesis, and Christian Latin then narrowed it to the pit where the damned go. English inherited the theological sense first; the ordinary chasm came later.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
abysmalabyssal
In a sentence
The cave floor dropped away into an abyss no torch could reach.
Six months after the layoffs the company was staring into an abyss.