Art & MusicGreek → English
Tomb
/tuːm/noun
A grave or vault built to hold the body of the dead.
The Greek roots
τύμβος
týmbos
burial mound
Literally: “burial mound”
Follow a root:τύμβος1 word
The story of the word
τύμβος is the heaped earth over a grave, not a chamber: Achilles piles one up for Patroclus and the Iliad measures it by eye. Latin tumba narrowed the sense to the grave itself, Old French tombe passed it along, and English had tomb by 1200 with the final b already going silent. A tombstone is therefore, strictly speaking, a stone on a mound.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 13th century
Same family
entombtombstone
In a sentence
The tomb is empty and has been since at least the ninth century.