Chord
/kɔrd/noun
A straight line joining two points on a curve.
The Greek roots
Literally: “gut-string”
The story of the word
Two different words share this spelling. The musical chord is a clipped form of accord and arrived from Latin through French; the chord of a circle, and the chords of the body, come from Greek χορδή, the gut that a lyre was strung with. English had plain cord from Old French, and sixteenth-century scholars inserted an h to show off the Greek χ, which is why geometry and anatomy spell it one way and rope-makers another. A notochord is a back-string and a harpsichord a harp-string, both keeping the Greek noun whole.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Draw a chord across the circle and the angle it subtends is the same from anywhere on the far arc.