Everyday LifeGreek → English
Zosimus
/ˈzɑsɪməs/noun
A Greek male name, borne by a pope, a historian and the earliest known alchemical author.
The Greek roots
ζώσιμος
zṓsimos
viable, likely to live
Literally: “likely to survive”
Follow a root:ζώσιμος1 word
The story of the word
The adjective ζώσιμος, from ζωή, life, was what you called a newborn expected to pull through, so the name is a small piece of hope for a child in a world of high infant mortality. Zosimos of Panopolis, writing around 300 AD in Egypt, left the oldest alchemical texts that survive in Greek. A different Zosimus, a pagan civil servant, wrote a history around 500 blaming the collapse of Rome on the abandonment of the old gods.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
Same family
zoologyzodiacprotozoanazoic
In a sentence
The manuscript preserves a recipe attributed to Zosimus for treating copper.