The Etymology Thread

[kleene*star]

A thread for sharing interesting facts about the etymology of words.



Today I was quite surprised to find out that "hard" and "arduous" aren't cognate. "Hard" comes from PIE *kortu- meaning "hard" (as in the opposite of soft) whereas "arduous" comes from PIE *eredh- meaning "high" (and is cognate with the suffix ortho-). In both words the meaning "difficult" is a later development. In the case of "arduous", the idea behind the semantic shift is that something high is more difficult to reach. While I wasn't able to find a precise explanation of how "hard" came to mean "difficult" but it's not difficult to intuit how.