Word Power: Education

Today’s lesson in Word Power is to understand the etymology and history behind the word education.

Education (Noun): [ed-u-ca-tion]

1. The act or process of educating or being educated.
2. The knowledge or skill obtained or developed by a learning process.
3. A program of instruction of a specified kind or level.  (American Heritage Dictionary)

Etymology of Eduction

In order to understand the etymology behind the word education, we must go back to the Latin language.  In Roman culture the verb educare was constructed meaning “to bring up, rear, train, raise, support, etc.”  However, this word wasn’t developed out of thin air.  The Romans, as was usually the case, took two distinct words and combined them to make the verb educare.

Ex

Ex was a common preposition used in the Latin language that simply meant “from, out of, from within”.  As this word was common in everyday speech, ex was often shortened to e.  In the Latin language, the Romans would attach the e in front of words in order to change the meaning or to intensify.  An example of this occurring in the Latin language is enatare, which means “to swim away, escape by swimming”.  The breakdown of enatare is ex and natare, with natare meaning “to swim, to float”.  Another example in the Latin language of e being attached to a word is evolvere, which means “to roll out, roll forth, unroll, reveal, etc.”  The breakdown of evolvere is ex and volvere, with volvere meaning “to roll, turn, turn round, etc.”  Hopefully, you can see that the word evolve is derived from the Latin combination of ex and volvere.

Duco, ducere, duxi, ductus

Ducere is the infinitve form of the Latin verb duco, which means “to lead, conduct, guide, etc.”  Once the preposition ex was prefixed to ducere, the ending for the verb changed from -ere to -are.  Hence, we get the construction of the word educare.  We often see the Latin root duc- in many words that we use today, such as reduction (the act of bringing back) and production (the act of bringing forward).

Summary

So there you have it folks, the word educate is directly derived from the Latin word educare, which was constructed by combining the two words, ex and ducere.  The literal translation of educate is to draw out of, lead out of, etc.  The Romans considered educating to be synonymous with drawing knowledge out of somebody or leading them out of regular thinking.  The Romans developed the noun, educatio from the verb educare.

Extra Credit

Educatio is a Latin noun meaning the act of educating.  This noun was developed from the 4th principal part of the verb educare.  The 4th principal part, as was usually the case in the Latin language, granted the Romans the ability to use the verb as an adjective for now the word could match any noun in number, gender, and case.  The 4th principal part of educare is educatus.  From this the Romans constructed the noun, educatio by dropping off the -us and adding the ending -io.  Therefore, educatio was formed to indicate the act of educating.  The suffix -io eventually changed to include an “n” at the end, this was in no doubt due to Germanic influence for no longer did nouns and adjectives have to match in case.  The same can be said for the Latin nouns creatio (creation) and relatio (relation).

Tune in next Thursday for the breakdown of the word Lucifer.

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