Everyday LifeGreek → English
Oil
/ɔɪl/noun
Any thick liquid that will not mix with water, from cooking fat to crude petroleum.
The Greek roots
ἔλαιον
élaion
olive oil
Literally: “the juice of the olive”
Follow a root:ἔλαιον3 words
The story of the word
For a Greek speaker ἔλαιον meant one thing only, the pressed juice of the olive; every later oil in the language is an extension of that single crop. Latin turned it into oleum, Old French into oile, and English generalised it until it could cover whale blubber and North Sea crude. Petroleum is the compromise word that resulted, rock-oil, half Latin and half Greek, coined when miners kept finding a burnable liquid where no olive had ever grown.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 12th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
olivepetroleumlinoleumoleander
In a sentence
Two spoons of oil in a cold pan, then the onions.