Flocking to Greg

Sometimes it takes a while to get caught up to a post that has some words but not others. Over four years ago I posted on words like amiable (and genial, affable,obliging, cordial, and amicable) but did not include gregarious. I thought of the word recently when using the word egregious, and wondered if they have the same root. So let us see.

Gregarious is an interesting word, and is best understood by studying its etymology first (thank you again, etymonline.com). The adjective gregarious came into English in the 1660s and first meant “living in flocks” and was used of animals. The 17^th-century English took it from the Latin word for those things that pertained to flocks: gregarious. It comes from “a reduplication of PIE [Proto-Indo-European] root *ger- ‘to gather together, assemble’ (cognates: Sanskrit gramah, Greek ageirein ‘to assemble,’ agora ‘assembly’” which makes it related to the word agoraphobia (see below).

It was not until 1789 that the first recorded use of gregarious to mean sociable or “fond of the company of others” (its primary use now) occurred. In that sense it is closer to in meaning to the word genial.

Agora is a noun meaning a place of assembly and was adopted from the Greek root word in the 1590s. 

Then in 1871 Carl Westphal, a Berlin psychiatrist, coined the German word Agoraphobie to mean fear of open spaces. By 1873 it has crossed into English  as agoraphobia.

Egregious is the oldest of our “greg” words, having entered English in the 1530s from the Latin word egregius that means excellent or extraordinary. Literally, it meant above (ex-) the flock (grege). But in the late 1500s it was apparently not good to be exceptional, and there came to be a negative meaning in the word egregious that has resulted in the complete loss of the original positive sense of the word. It still means extraordinary, but only in a bad way.

So while in the early 1500s you may have wanted to be egregious, you will now have to settle for being gregarious when you are in the agora, assuming you are not agoraphobic.