Words & WritingGreek → English
Barbarism
/ˈbɑːrbərɪzəm/noun
A word wrongly formed or wrongly used, or more loosely, brutal and uncivilised behaviour.
The Greek roots
βάρβαρος
bárbaros
non-Greek-speaking, foreign
-ισμός
-ismós
practice, habit
Literally: “speaking like a foreigner”
The story of the word
βάρβαρος is imitative: to a Greek ear foreign speech went bar-bar, and the word meant nothing worse than not-our-language until the Persian wars loaded it with contempt. Ancient grammarians used βαρβαρισμός as a precise technical term for a fault inside a single word, wrong form, wrong quantity, wrong accent, and paired it with σολοικισμός, a fault of construction across a sentence. English kept both terms and then let barbarism drift into meaning cruelty, which the grammarians never meant.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
Same family
barbarianbarbaricsolecismBarbary
In a sentence
Purists called the new plural a barbarism and used it themselves within a decade.