Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Diaspora
/daɪˈæspərə/noun
A population living dispersed outside its ancestral homeland.
The Greek roots
διά
diá
across, through
σπείρειν
speírein
to sow, to scatter
Literally: “a scattering across”
The story of the word
The image is agricultural: seed thrown across a field, from the verb that also gives sperm and spore. The Septuagint uses διασπορά in Deuteronomy for Israel scattered among the kingdoms, and for most of its English life the word meant that dispersion and no other. Its extension to the African, Irish and Armenian diasporas is twentieth-century, and the lower-case spelling followed the widening.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
spermsporesporadic
In a sentence
The diaspora sends home more money each year than the tourism industry earns.
Half the choir were second-generation diaspora who had never seen the village.