Ecclesiastical Words That Come from French

On 28 September 1066, William the Conqueror of Normandy arrived on British soil. He defeated the British in the Battle of Hastings on October 14, and on Christmas Day, he was crowned King of England in Westminster Abby. In the years and centuries that followed, English took on many French words to add to its Anglo-Saxon and Germanic base. This is our sixth post about how English changed after that defeat.

Canterbury Cathedral goes back to 597AD when St Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory
 the Great as a missionary, established his seat (or 'Cathedra') in Canterbury.
 In 1170 Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered in the Cathedral and ever since,
the Cathedral has attracted thousands of pilgrims, as told famously
 in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

For example, when Chaucer wrote in the opening of lines of The Canterbury Tales that when April's sweet showers pierce the drought of March and "Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages," it was 300 years after the Norman Invasion. By then, the English word pilgrim was in widespread use. The French word pelegrin — meaning "foreign" — in turn came from a Latin root for "abroad." Pilgrim and pilgrimage have the same root as the English word peregrinate, which means to travel, especially on foot.

Many of those words that entered English were ecclesiastical words from religion and the church. The word religion itself first appeared in English to mean "life under monastic vows." The Old French word religion derived from a Latin word meaning "obligation, bond, reverence."

A life under monastic vows came with all sorts of practices, like saying one's prayers, derived from the Old French verb preier "to ask earnestly." A preiere was something "obtained by entreaty" and of uncertain outcome. This sense of uncertainty is reflected in English words sharing the same root as prayer, including precarious, deprecate, postulate, and expostulate.

The word for preach, however, came from an Old French root meaning not to ask but "to proclaim." The French verb prechier came from the Latin praedicare, to "pre + declare."

The holiness of saint (from Old French seint) can be found in the word's Latin root sanctus, meaning "holy." The English word sanctuary is from Old French sanctuaire, which originally meant a "church or other sacred place where a fugitive was immune by the law of the medieval church from arrest." Related English words include sanctify, sanctity, and sanctimonious.

Merci is a French word still in use, today as the equivalent of the English "thank you" — and in Old French it meant "pity" — just as we still use it in the phrase "have mercy on me." We also use this root when we speak of merciless killings and merciful people.

More words from French