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Showing posts from October, 2013

Word of the Month: 'Organe'

Pending online publication of the second edition of ‘N’, AND revision work continues with the editorial team currently gathering information, citations and references for the letter ‘O’.  To offer a glimpse of the process: it has already become apparent that while AND#1 only had one entry for organe , AND#2 (the second, online edition) will have (at least) two: one musical and one herbal. The first entry (which was already present in AND#1), now becoming organe 1 , is derived from Latin organum. The word can be traced back to Greek οργανον, which originally referred to a tool or instrument to work with (cf. εργον, Greek for ‘work, task’), and more specifically to a musical instrument. That latter meaning persisted in medieval times, and the DMLBS lists as its 5 th sense: ‘musical instrument that can be tuned’ (DMLBS 2053a). Whereas the modern musical sense of ‘organ’, i.e. an instrument using pipes sounded by keys, is already well-attested in medieval Latin organum and