Words & WritingGreek → English
Polyglot
/ˈpɒliɡlɒt/noun
A person who speaks several languages, or a book printed in several languages at once.
The Greek roots
πολύς
polýs
many
γλῶττα
glôtta
tongue, language
Literally: “many-tongued”
The story of the word
The book sense came first. The Complutensian Polyglot Bible, finished in Spain in 1517, set Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic in parallel columns on the same page, and English picked the word up for that kind of edition. Γλῶττα is the Attic form of γλῶσσα, tongue, which also gives glossary and the gloss written in a manuscript margin.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
- First recorded
- 1650s
Same family
glossaryisoglosspolygonpolymath
In a sentence
Trieste in 1910 was a polyglot port where you heard Italian, Slovene and German on one street.