Alexandria
/ˌælɪɡˈzændriə/noun
The Egyptian port founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, and the name of several other cities he founded.
The Greek roots
Literally: “defender of men”
The story of the word
Ἀλέξανδρος is defender of men, and the name is old: it turns up in Mycenaean Linear B centuries before Alexander, and in the Iliad Paris carries Alexandros as a second name. Alexander stamped it on a chain of cities from Egypt to the Hindu Kush, and one of them, laid out on the Egyptian coast in 331 BC, outgrew all the rest. Its library made the word shorthand for scholarship, and Kandahar in Afghanistan is another of those foundations with the name worn down almost past recognition.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
Same family
In a sentence
The manuscripts were copied in Alexandria and carried west.
Alexandria was Greek-speaking for a thousand years.