Word Bank This word bank is a selection of words, their meanings, and the history behind them that are featured in the book English Year 9. You can look at sample pages of this book and order your copy on our website. A comprehensive Teaching Guide is also available to accompany English Year 9. • In passage B Brian Keenan uses the word somnambulant. It means sleep walking and comes from somnus, the Latin for sleep and the Latin word ambulare (to walk). English also takes several words from the Latin verbs loquor – to speak – and sedere – to sit. • Emile Zola uses the word immured. It comes from the Latin word murus – a wall. It means walled up or imprisoned. • The word maritime, which Thor Heyerdahl uses, comes from the Latin word mare – sea. We also get a number of English words from the Latin words aqua – water and navis – a ship. • Michael McCarthy uses the word consequently which comes from sequor the Latin meaning I follow. He also uses magnitude – from the Latin adjective magnus meaning great. The word catastrophic, also used in Passage A, is an adjective deriving from the Greek noun catastrophe. Its literal meaning is overturning from cata (down, away, off, against, and strephein (to turn). Tel: 01580 764242 Web: www.galorepark.co.uk ©Galore Park Publishing Ltd • The word kitsch which Clover Stroud uses in Passage A is an adjective meaning vulgar, tawdry or pretentious. It came into English from German during the 20th century. Words have entered English from many other languages. There are two main reasons for this. Often English speakers simply adopted a word from somewhere else because they didn’t have a word of their own which expressed that particular idea – kitsch is one of these. So is cul‐de‐sac from French and graffiti from Italian. It is a two‐
way process. French, for example, has taken words like le parking and le weekend from English. The other main reason is that from the 16th to the 19th centuries Britain colonised many countries across the world. The English language picked up words from the countries it occupied, such as bungalow from India, totem from Africa and kangaroo (no prizes for guessing where the last one came from!). • We have talked a lot about the origins of words – etymology – in this book. The word ghoulish (or its varients) occurs in the passages above more than once. It comes from the Arabic word ghul – a spirit which seized children. Words beginning with gh‐ come from various sources. Ghost and ghastly developed from Old English (see page 112). Other gh words from elsewhere include: gherkin from Dutch, ghetto from Italian and ghee from Hindi. Many gn‐ and kn‐ words, on the other hand, derive from Old English. These include: gnome, gnat, gnaw, gnarl, knife, knee, knave, knight, knock, know. But gn‐ words such as gnostic come from Ancient Greek and gnu comes from Xhosa – an African language. So you cannot generalise with etymology. Tel: 01580 764242 Web: www.galorepark.co.uk ©Galore Park Publishing Ltd