Torturous or Tortuous?

Last week I used a couple of words that haven’t been covered yet: penultimate and tortuous.

Tortuous is close to torturous in spelling, but has a far different meaning. Knowing which is the good word is helpful (in fact, knowing that there are two words spelled and sounding very similar is also good).

Tortuous means winding or twisting, or full of turns, like a slow moving river or a road climbing a mountain that is full of switchbacks. It came to English in the late 1300s, from an Anglo-French word with the same spelling. The Anglo-French got the word from the Latin word that means full of twists, tortuosus, which was a form of the Latin word for twisting or winding, tortus.

Torturous is the adjective form of the noun torture, and describes anything that causes pain. The noun came into English in the early 1400s, from the Old French word torture, which came directly from the Late Latin word for turning or twisting, torture. I’m not sure how the word came to be associated exclusively with pain, but somewhere between the use of the “rack” and a twisted ankle it developed that sense. The adjective developed later in the 1400s, then the verb in the 1580s.  

Something that is tortuous can also be torturous, but it is not always the case. Something that is torturous may be tortuous, as any number of wrestling moves would demonstrate, but waterboarding is an example of something torturous that is not tortuous.

The penultimate word today is penultimate. Having a spate of forms (penult as noun or adjective, penultima, penultimate), the most common use today is penultimate, an adjective describing the next to last. The penultimate syllable of the word penultimate is ti-. The first form of the word to arrive in English is the adjective form penult, which arrived in the 1530s. By the 1570s penult became a noun, then the more Latinate noun penultima arrived in the 1580s, and penultimate came to English in the 1680s. The words are all related to the Latin phrase penultima syllaba, which means next to last syllable. Penultima is formed from the feminine form of the adjective penultimus, which was formed from adding paene (meaning “almost”) to ultima (meaning “final.”)

Our last word today is one I used in the last paragraph: spate. While you may have thought I exhausted words for numbers back in October last year when I posted about words like panoply and manifold and multiplicity, I missed the word spate. A spate is a sudden outpouring, and in Britain refers primarily to water, like a flood or a heavy rain. In America it has a broader sense, referring to any large pouring out. It was originally a Scottish and northern English word (in the 1400s), and while we do not know its etymology the Dutch word spuiten, which means to flow or spout, or the Old French word espoit, which means “flood” are two likely sources. The use of the word to refer to any large quantity of an item was first used in about 1610. 

It may have been a tortuous path to get to spate, but I hope it wasn't torturous.