Faith & RitualGreek → English
Pandemonium
/ˌpændɪˈməʊniəm/noun
Wild uproar and confusion.
The Greek roots
πᾶν
pân
all, every
δαίμων
daímōn
spirit, divine power
Literally: “place of all the demons”
The story of the word
Milton made the word up for Paradise Lost in 1667. Pandæmonium is the capital of Hell, raised out of the ground in an hour by Mammon's engineers while the fallen angels wait outside, and it named a building before it named a noise. δαίμων in classical Greek was a neutral power, a share of divinity: Socrates' δαιμόνιον was the inner voice that told him when to stop. Christian Greek turned it into the thing you exorcise, and Milton inherited that sense.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → literary coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1667
Same family
demonpandemicpanaceaeudaimonia
In a sentence
The whistle went, the equaliser stood, and the stand went into pandemonium.
Pandemonium in Milton is architecture, not chaos, which is the better joke.