Nothing Nefarious about Multifarious

I ran across the word multifarious recently, which necessitated a trip to the dictionary since I had never seen the word before and the context didn’t give me only one possible meaning (or approximate the meaning).

I wondered, does it have any similarity to the more familiar word nefarious? Do they have the same root word?

Well, I only checked the meaning and went back to my reading. Today let’s look at the two and see if they only sound alike but otherwise have no similar ancestry.

Multifarious comes from the Latin multifarius, which is from multifariam and means having many kinds of parts or elements, of great variety, diverse, manifold. Multi-, as you would expect, means many, and farius comes from facere, meaning to make, according to my dictionary. But etymonline.com suggests the root is not farius/facere but fariam, which means parts. The online reference is the one I find more convincing, and probably represents a more current educational perspective. But can’t you see a Latin brouhaha at the etymology convention over this discrepancy? The word dates from the 1590s.

Brouhaha, on the other hand, has some certainty and a much more interesting etymology. It is a French word meaning a noisy stir or “wrangle” – that’s what it says in my dictionary! It has been used by the French since 1552, and according to etymonline.com was “said by Gamillscheg to have been, in medieval theater, ‘the cry of the devil disguised as clergy.’” Maybe I should hold off on the reference to Wednesday… It’s possible it came from the Hebrew barukh habba, which of course you recognize as being from Psalms 118, where it says “blessed be the one who comes.” I like that sense better.

Back to our original words. Nefarious also comes from the Latin at about the same time (although multifarious precedes nefarious by about 10 years). The Latin word is nefarius, and is developed from the word nefas, which means crime or wrong or impiety. Nefas is formed from ne- (a negative prefix) and fas, the Latin word for right, lawful, or divinely spoken. It now means very wicked, villainous or iniquitous. Most of the usages I’ve encountered have a sense of plotting to them, so villainous comes the closest to my understanding.

No matter which side you take in the great multifarious debate, both multifarious and nefarious have different ancestry. But, because of the way Latin conjugated words, the endings come to English looking very similar.