How a Greek Goddess Gave us the Word Iridescent
Hello,
I’ve been pondering the word history of colours recently. My previous posts about colours are still popular (Colour Rhymes, Mummy Brown, and Magenta). I enjoy painting with watercolours and it would be fun to work my way through my paintbox exploring the history of each name – burnt Sienna is named after the earth around that beautiful Tuscan town, for example. Words for another day, perhaps.
This week’s word, iridescent, is more of a swirl of various colours. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “showing many bright colours that change with movement”.
The best examples are found in the movement of nature – the glamorous sheen on the feathers of a starling or kingfisher, the shine of mother-of-pearl, the glint of the light caught on the wings of a dragonfly. Sadly I’m not a good enough photographer to have caught any of those glorious images with my camera lens so you’ll have to settle for the only iridescent items I could find in my home – my cuff-links.
iridescent (and a little blurry, sorry!)Luckily the origin of the word is easier to capture than its visual image. Iridescent entered English in the 1700s to describe anything rainbow-coloured. It was coined from the Latin word iris (rainbow), although we don’t know who exactly came up with it.
Iris is also used in English for a family of gorgeous flowers which consistently fail to flourish in the heavy clay soils of my garden, and for the coloured part of the eye. It is always associated with bright colours.
That association doesn’t arise in Latin, it’s one the Greeks gave us and as regular wordfoolery readers know, where there’s a Greek origin, there’s nearly always a god or goddess hanging around looking for credit. Iris and iridescent is no exception.
Iris was the messenger of Hera, queen of the Greek gods. She was the personification of the rainbow and iris means rainbow in Greek (and in Latin as previously mentioned).
Iris traveled along her rainbow with the speed of the wind to bring messages to earth. She had golden wings to help her on her way. It’s not surprising that she traveled with the speed of the wind as she married Zephyrus, the god of the west wind. You may remember him from my post about the zephyr wind.
By the command of Zeus, Iris carried a jug of water from the River Styx, the river souls cross to enter the realm of Hades. She used this to put to sleep those who perjure themselves.
The element iridium is named for her. Sadly it is not iridescent. It’s silvery. It was discovered and named in 1803 by a British scientist called Smithson Tennant. He named it after Iris because many of the salts he obtained while working on the element were bright in colour.
Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling.
Grace (@Wordfoolery)
p.s. I finished July’s session of CampNaNoWriMo with 30,419 more words written of my ongoing serial “The Librarian’s Secret Diary” – the adventures of a new librarian in a small Irish town, working with her buzzword-spouting boss and her book-hating senior librarian. New episodes go live every Wednesday over on the subscription reading platform Channillo (you can try the first episode for free there).
