Faith & RitualGreek → English
Baptism
/ˈbæptɪzəm/noun
The Christian rite of admission performed with water.
The Greek roots
βάπτω
báptō
to dip, plunge
Literally: “a dipping”
Follow a root:βάπτω1 word
The story of the word
In everyday Greek βάπτω is what a dyer does to cloth and what a smith does to hot iron, plunging it in. βαπτίζω, the intensive form, means dipping thoroughly or repeatedly, and the ritual in the Jordan took this ordinary working word. English received it through Church Latin baptismus and Old French batesme around 1300, and the spelling was later pulled back towards the Greek.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- c. 1300
Same family
baptizeBaptistbaptistery
In a sentence
The baptism was held on a Sunday afternoon with about forty people there.
His first week on the ward was a baptism of the unforgettable kind.