Words & WritingGreek → English
Critic
/ˈkrɪtɪk/noun
Someone who assesses the merit of art, or who finds fault publicly.
The Greek roots
κριτικός
kritikós
able to judge
Literally: “one who judges”
Follow a root:κριτικός1 word
The story of the word
κρίνειν is to separate and decide, and κριτικός is the person who can do it. The same verb yields κρίσις, the moment of decision, which in Hippocratic medicine is the day a fever turns and the patient's fate is settled; that is the crisis still in use. English took critic in the 1580s for a judge of writing, and the fault-finder sense followed within a generation. ὑποκριτής, the actor who answers on stage, gives hypocrite from the same root.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1580s
Same family
crisiscriterionhypocritediacritic
In a sentence
One critic walked out at the interval and wrote nine hundred words about it.