Faith & RitualGreek → English
Monk
/mʌŋk/noun
A man living under religious vows in a community.
The Greek roots
μοναχός
monachós
solitary, single
Literally: “one who is alone”
Follow a root:μοναχός1 word
The story of the word
The first monks were hermits in the Egyptian desert, alone by definition. Within a century they had organised into houses with rules and rotas, so the word for solitary came to describe a man who lives with fifty others under one roof and rarely gets a moment to himself. Old English took munuc from church Latin before the Conquest, which is why monk sounds native and monastery plainly does not.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → Old English
- First recorded
- Old English
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
monasterymonasticmonopolymonolith
In a sentence
A monk showed us the library and asked us not to photograph the bindings.