God

Speaking English is a uniquely human trait*, and so is belief in God (at least, as far as we know), which is fortunate for this terribly contrived effort to start talking about gods. The Greek word for god is theos, which graces us with the study of God in the form theology. A pantheon is the collection of all gods, an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in God, a polytheist is someone who believes in multiple gods, and a theocracy is a government where God is the supreme ruler. It drifts into English with some less obvious examples too — it’s hidden away in words like enthusiastic (meaning literally ‘inspired by God’) or even in names like Dorothy (Dora = gift, thea = god)**, Theodore (theo = god, dora = gift) and Timothy (time = honour, theo = god). One step further provides us with the word fedora, which comes from Theodore.

The Latin word for god is deus, and just like the Greek, this seeds all sorts of words in English. It comes from an older word meaning ‘to shine’, which is why some European languages have a word for day that sounds a lot like the word for God — e.g. Spanish dios (god) vs día (day), Welsh duw (god) vs diwrnod (day) — after all, the day is when the sun shines. Deus ex machina is thrown around rather a lot these days (it means ‘god from the machine’) but we also see it in words like deity, diva, divine, and the well-known French and Spanish valedictions adieu and adios, which roughly mean ‘go with God’. The connection with the word for day means we have similar words like diary (a narrative of a day’s events), meridian and even dismal, which comes from the Latin dies mali which means ‘bad day’.

Despite the similarities, the English word day is not thought to come from the same source deus. It possibly comes from a very old word meaning ‘to burn’. You can read about this on the wonderful Etymonline website here, but for now, let’s adjourn.

* Do parrots count?
** Incidentally it is the dora here that we also find in Pandora, of Pandora’s Box fame. Pandora means ‘all gifts’, given that in the myths she was gifted as a bride to Epimetheus, who nicely brings us back round to theos again