True and Habitual Words from A Variety of Sources for Those Who Can't Get Enough

As inveterate readers of this blog may suspect, I am a voracious and eclectic reader. Many of the words for this blog come from my reading.

So today we’ll look at inveterate, voracious, and eclectic before we get to words, beginning next week, from my recent reading.

Inveterate, according to Dictionary.com, means “settled or confirmed in a habit, practice, feeling, or the like.” (And I hope any reader of this blog becomes an inveterate reader.) The word comes directly from the Latin word inveteratus, which means “of long standing, chronic,” according to etymonline.com. It came to English in the late 1300s. The Latin word is formed by combining in- (meaning “in”, of all things), and veterare, a form of the word vetus, which means “old” and from which we also get the word veteran.

Veteran is the word to use of anyone who has long service or experience in any occupation. But veteran didn’t arrive in English until about 1500, through French. It originally meant just “old”, but by the year 1600 had added the current meaning, and shortly after also began to be used as an adjective.

Voracious is the adjective form of voracity, which is not to be confused with veracity, which is related to verity.

Voracious primarily means consuming or craving large quantities of food, but secondarily applies to anything consumed in great quantity. It also means exceedingly eager or avid. Voracity, a noun, arrived in English in the 1520s, from the Middle French word voracité, which came from the Latin word voracitatem, which refers to greediness or ravenousness. The adjective voracious arrived over a century later, in the 1630s, as a formation of the English noun.

Veracity is a noun that came from the same Latin source word (verus) as the noun verity. Verity is truth, while veracity is habitual truthfulness or conforming to a fact. (Veracious is a word, the adjective form of veracity.) Veracity came to English from the French word véracité, which came from the Latin word veracitatem, which means truthfulness and is a form of verus, which means true.

Which brings us to eclectic. Eclectic is an adjective that came to English in the 1680s. It originally was the name given to a group of ancient philosophers (like Panaetius, Posidonius, Carneades, Philo, Cicero and my personal favorite Seneca) who selected their doctrines from various systems. The French called them eclectique, their form of the Greek word eklektikos which literally translated is “picking out.” Now, any time a group of something has great variety it can be called eclectic. That meaning didn’t develop until 1847.

So veracity and veratious refer to truth, voracity and voracious refer to consumption, veteran and inveterate both refer to a length of time, and eclectic means bringing together from various sources, which is what these words have in common. For those of you who can't get enough of this blog.