Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Asylum
/əˈsaɪləm/noun
Protection given by a state to someone who has fled danger in their own country.
The Greek roots
ἀ-
a-
not, without
σύλη
sýlē
right of seizure
Literally: “not to be seized”
The story of the word
σύλη was the legal right to seize a person or their goods in reprisal, and a ἄσυλον was ground where that right stopped working: certain temples, certain altars. English borrowed the sanctuary sense in the fifteenth century. Then 'lunatic asylum' appeared in the 1770s and dragged the word toward the madhouse for two hundred years, until political asylum pulled it back to something close to the Greek.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
In a sentence
She applied for asylum three weeks after crossing the border.
The old asylum on the hill has been converted into flats.