Ravenous But Not Rapacious Reading Results in Being Lissome

I ran across three words this week in my readings, two of which are follow up to recent posts.

While last week’s post covered some "–some" words, it could not cover them all. One that I encountered this week was lissome. It is a variant spelling for lithesome, which is more difficult to pronounce, and developed around 1800. Lithesome had arrived in use in 1768, but because it is a voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative followed by a voiceless coronal sibilant (th sound followed by s) it is not easy to pronounce, hence along came lissome. It is pronounced with a short i sound rather than a long i sound since it is followed by a double s. It sounds like the flower Alyssum, a word we’ll have to defer (defer until later is unnecessary repetition).

Lithe, the base word for lissome that means flexible or limber, is an adjective (as are lithesome and lissome). It is a very old word in English, having survived from an Old English word that meant soft, gentle or meek. By Middle English it was used of the weather, and developed its current meaning around 1300.

Our second word today follows up on the blog post on voracious, inveterate reading. Had there been space I could have added the word ravenous to that post. Ravenous, which means extremely hungry or rapacious (we’ll get to that in a minute), does not come from the bird named the Raven but from an Old French word, ravinos, which the Old French developed from their word that meant “to seize”, raviner, which came from the word for a violent rush or a robbery, ravine.  Yes, that’s where we get one of our words for a narrow, steep-sided valley through which water often rushes violently, a ravine. When the word we started with, ravenous, came to use in English in the late 1300s it meant obsessed with plundering or excessively greedy. Within a century its meaning expanded to any excessive appetite, like reading or food.

The word rapacious mentioned above is the adjective that currently has a meaning related to plundering and greediness. It came to English in the 1650s from the Latin word rapaci-, a  “stem of rapax, ‘grasping,’ itself from stem of rapere ‘to seize,’” according to etymonline.com. The stem word rapere, if you remember, is the word from which we get our word rapine. 

Today’s final word from this week’s reading is rubicund. It is related to both the name of the red gem ruby and the river Rubicon which is another word we’ll have to defer. Rubicund is more closely related in use to our word sanguinary than ruby or Rubicon, although sanguinary is more related to blood than just color. Rubicund, by the way, is a good adjective for something that is red or reddish or ruddy (having a fresh, healthy red color). It came to English about 1500 from the French word rubicund, or perhaps directly from the Latin word rubicundus (it gets my etymological vote), a form of the word rubere that means “to be red.” One could say that rubicund is the pedantic word for ruddy, but why would you?

So you’ve now read about red, and perhaps are no longer ravenous or rapacious to find out about lissome. But we still have Alyssum and Rubicon to look forward to. We’ll cross those next week.