Earth & SkyGreek → English
Oasis
/oʊˈeɪsɪs/noun
A fertile watered patch in a desert, or any small relief in the middle of something harsh.
The Greek roots
ὄασις
óasis
fertile spot in desert
Literally: “dwelling place in the sand”
Follow a root:ὄασις1 word
The story of the word
Herodotus uses ὄασις of a place in the Libyan desert, and the word is not Greek at all: it was taken from Egyptian, where the ancestor of Coptic ouahe meant a dwelling place. Greek passed it to Late Latin and Latin to English in the seventeenth century. The figurative use, an oasis of calm, arrived in the nineteenth century and has since become the commoner one for people who live nowhere near a desert.
- How it travelled
- Egyptian → Ancient Greek → Late Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
oases
In a sentence
The reading room was an oasis in an otherwise unbearable building.