Faith & RitualGreek → English
Pentecost
/ˈpɛntɪkɔːst/noun
The Christian feast on the fiftieth day after Easter marking the descent of the Holy Spirit, and the Jewish festival of Shavuot from which it grew.
The Greek roots
πεντηκοστή
pentēkostḗ
fiftieth (day)
Literally: “the fiftieth”
Follow a root:πεντηκοστή1 word
The story of the word
Greek arithmetic laid over a Hebrew feast. Greek-speaking Jews called Shavuot πεντηκοστή, the fiftieth, because it fell fifty days after Passover, and the Greek New Testament kept the count when it described the Spirit arriving. The word entered Old English as pentecosten well before the Norman Conquest, which makes it one of the oldest Greek borrowings in the language.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old English
- First recorded
- Old English
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
pentagonpentathlonPentateuchpentameter
In a sentence
The choir sings in seven languages at Pentecost, which is the whole point of the feast.