Seismic
/ˈsaɪzmɪk/adjective
Relating to earthquakes or the waves they send through the ground, or figuratively, huge and sudden.
The Greek roots
Literally: “of shaking”
The story of the word
Robert Mallet, an Irish engineer, buried gunpowder charges on Dublin beaches in 1849 and timed how fast the shock ran through wet and dry sand. The vocabulary he needed for the results is the vocabulary we still use, seismic among it. The Greek noun comes from σείω, I shake, and Thucydides uses it of the tremors that interrupted the Peloponnesian War. In English the word now does more work on election night than in geology.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1858
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The building is rated for seismic activity up to magnitude eight.
The result was a seismic shift in how the party talks about tax.