Amethyst

The story of the word

Greeks held that the stone kept a drinker sober, so cups were carved from it and stones set in rings against drunkenness. The colour is the point: amethystine quartz looks like watered wine, and one modern reading is that the stone let a host serve water that passed for the real thing. Μέθυ, the wine word inside it, came back in the 1830s when chemists built methyl out of μέθυ and ὕλη, wood, for wood spirit, which leaves amethyst and methane sharing an ancestor.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English

First recorded

13th century