Faith & RitualGreek → English
Exodus
/ˈɛksədəs/noun
A mass departure of people from a place.
The Greek roots
ἐξ
ex
out of, from
ὁδός
hodós
road, way
Literally: “the way out”
The story of the word
ἔξοδος is plain Greek for an exit and named ordinary things: the chorus leaving the stage, an army marching out, a door. The Alexandrian translators used it as the title of the second book of the Torah, and the whole modern sense of mass migration grew out of that single application. The ὁδός inside it also runs through method, period and odometer.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
methodperiodepisodeodometer
In a sentence
The Friday exodus starts around three and blocks every road out of the city.
He read the Exodus account aloud, all forty years of it compressed into an hour.