Attention: FUTURE WILDCATS!

Rising 8th-graders, join us June 9-27 for the Summer Enrichment Program at Saint Ignatius! Includes daily breakfast and lunch, two camp t-shirts, many giveaways, awards and more!

Saint Ignatius High School

Etymology Word of the Week

Director of Admissions Pat O'Rourke '90, a self-proclaimed "word nerd," brings you his Etymology Word of the Week. Every other week he presents an online Etymology lesson just for fun!

Etymology Word of the Week – As some of you know, in addition to working in the Admissions Office, I also teach Latin at Saint Ignatius and am something of a "word nerd."  Thus, each week, I’ll sneak a vocabulary word (sometimes derived from Latin, sometimes not) into the e-blast.  Here then is this week’s edition of the Etymology Word of the Week.

Dandelion


Definition: “a weedy plant of the daisy family having edible, deeply toothed leaves, golden-yellow flowers, and rounded clusters of white, hairy seeds.”   

Origin/Derivation: From the French phrase dent de lion meaning “tooth of the lion”.  The Latin and Greek stems for “tooth” are dent- and dont-, respectively.

Related Words/Phrases: al dente, dental, dentist, denture, indent, mastodon, megalodon, orthodontist, periodontal, trident, bident

(All information is from www.wikipedia.org, www.etymonline.com and/or www.dictionary.com)

“Old Saw” of the Week:
See if you can “complete the phrase” of this time-worn (but true!) adage:

“Waste not”…

...want not”

Caption: This is an older usage of “want” that means “to lack or need.”