Light Reading

I keep notes on words that pop up that seem as if they're going to be interesting, but my notes aren't so thorough that I always know where those words came from, unfortunately. A word that cropped up today, at some point, from somewhere, was "lambent", which I noticed because...well, where the hell might it have come from? The suffix "-ent" is obvious enough; it appears in lots of English words denoting a state of being or an action. But "lamb-"? Couldn't have anything to do with the animal!

Luckily, no, because that would be ridiculous. ("Lambent" means "radiant", or "flickering", as a flame.) "Lambent" actually comes from Latin "lambere", "to lick", and this is descended from Indo-European "lab-" or "-leb", with the same meaning.

Hmmm. "Lab-". "Lick". You don't suppose "lab-" is also the source of such lippy words as "labial" and even "lip" itself, do you? Sure you do! Because it is!

"Lamb", by the way, has a preposterous origin; deriving unchanged from the Gothic word, it is related to Greek "elaphos", "deer", and "elaphos" in turn is a cousin to Proto-Germanic "elkh-", which means, yes, "elk".

An elk is not a deer is not a lamb!