Kyrie

The story of the word

One of the few scraps of Greek left standing after the Roman liturgy switched to Latin, kept because congregations already knew it by heart. Κύριε ἐλέησον was ordinary petitioning language before the church took it, the phrase you used on an official you wanted something from. The same κύριος gives English "church", by way of κυριακόν, a thing belonging to the lord, which travelled north through Germanic and arrived as kirk and church.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Church Latin → English

First recorded

14th century