A Ghost or a Knight?

If you have read the last two posts you may think I have run the gamut of words about the numerous words about numbers. Unless you noticed that last line on last week’s blog, when I previewed this week’s content. Panoply, range, and spectrum, are not in the same numerical category as some of the other words. There is an element of sight in these words, and while they relate in their descriptiveness of a large amount of something, they also differ.

Panoply is an interesting word. Most people, I dare say, are unaware of its history (unless you’re a hard-core fan of Renaissance Faires).  Panoply’s is primarily used to describe “a wide-ranging and impressive array or display.” But it retains the secondary definition of “a complete suit of armor,” which is how it came to English during the Renaissance, in the 1570s, from the Greek word panoplia, and originally was figurative, due to its derivation from the Greek of Ephesians 6:11, which says “put on the whole armor of God.” (For those of you dressing as knights for Halloween, you’re not in panoply if you’re missing any piece of your armor.) Panoply in Greek is formed by combining pan-, meaning “all”, with hopla, meaning “arms” and the plural of hoplon, the Greek word for tool, weapon or implement. For those of  you who are scholars of ancient Greek military terms, you may be familiar with the word hoplite, which refers to the “heavy-armed foot soldier of ancient Greece” and has been used in English since 1727.

Panoply didn’t develop its current wide-ranging meaning until 1829. My guess is that its first use of this meaning was in a poem by John Neal, called Ode to Peace, in which he wrote:

...Child of the North - New England - Up and heave

Thy sumptuous drapery to the wind! Thy brow

Begirt with adamant, lay bare; and leave

The lurid panoply of death; and go

Forth like the mightiest and the best of them

Who, if they move to grapple with a foe,

Put on a snowy robe - a diadem

Of triple stars. Up with thee, in thy grave

And awful beauty! Let the nations hear

The language of endurance from the brave;

The song of peace from such as know not fear.

So if panoply is wide-ranging and refers to completeness, what does a range refer to? It has more of a reference to limits, whether the “extent to which…variation is possible” or the “scope of an operation or action.” It also refers to distance, usually of a projectile or to a cooking appliance. It came to English in about 1200 from the Old French word of the same spelling, and originally carried the same meaning, that of a row or line of persons. We get the word rank, as in “rank and file”, from the same source.

What’s interesting about the word range is not only its range of meanings, but its historical development.  While it started out referring to a line of people, its first divergent meaning is to the cooking appliance, a meaning which developed in the 15^th century. Why that meaning came to be is unknown, a historical and etymological mystery. By the 1590s the meaning of range as “the distance a gun can send a bullet” came into use, although the reference to the place where you can practice shooting did not develop until 1862. (Perhaps ammunition was too valuable to waste practicing shooting until then.) Since much shooting was at animals in the 1600s, it’s not surprising that the meaning of “area over which animals seek food” developed in the 1620s. Shortly after, in the 1660s, we (not me, but those alive at the time) adopted the meaning in greatest use today, of “scope or extent.” In case you’re wondering, the use of the word to describe a series of mountains was not developed until 1705.

It’s time to shed some light on spectrum. My Webster’s dictionary defines spectrum as “the series of colored bands diffracted and arranged in the order of their respective wave-lengths by the passage of white light through a prism or other diffracting medium and shading continuously from red (produced by the longest wave visible) to violet (produced by the shortest). Phew! It is not until the fourth definition we get the synonym for panoply or range: “a continuous range or entire extent.” It also ascribes its coinage as a physics term to Sir Isaac Newton in 1671. While etymonline.com mentions its first usage of the initial definition to the 1670s, it gives an older usage of the word.

In the 1610s it was used as a form of the word specter to refer to an apparition or ghost. Taken directly from the Latin word spectrum, our word originally retained the Latin meaning of a ghostly image or apparition, or specter. Specter is and was a word adopted from the Latin through French (where it is spelled spectre).