Which Came First – Festival or Feast?

Hello,

This week’s word is another thanks to Academy of Books’ Teen Book Club members – festival. I love a good festival myself so was delighted to see this word on their list, even more so when I discovered I could also pull in the word feast. Anybody who knows me knows feasting is a hobby of mine.

Festival is actually an abbreviation, something which was news to me when I began rummaging around on this one, but let’s start at the beginning. Feast (see below) comes from the word festum in Latin for a feast or holiday. This transferred into Medieval Latin as festivalis (a church holiday, such as Christmas or a saint’s day). This moved into Old French as festival – an adjective to describe something as being joyful, happy, solemn, or suitable for a feast. It’s interesting to see solemn and joyful in the same adjective but it does fit the two sides to a church festival – the intention is joy and yet it’s a solemn event.

By the 1300s you had a festival day in English, again in this adjective sense but by the 1580s you would have a festal day, the day in the calendar for this festival activity and that was shortened from festival day to festival meaning the day itself and the activities on that day. Of course festivals can also last longer than a day, an example being the festival of Easter or music festivals. It is fascinating to see how an adjective word moved to become a noun.

You can’t have a feast without a little tipple, or two

Feast’s history is tightly entwined with festival, as explained above, so it seems only fair to describe it here too. Feast pre-dates festival in English as it arrived around 1200 when it described a secular celebration, often held on a church holiday. Church feast days could often be pretty rowdy affairs as they were the few days the common folk had to party. The invention of the weekend was many, many centuries away. Feast was often seen as the opposite of fasting. Fasting often preceded important feasts – something still observed with Lent and Advent for Easter and Christmas.

The roots of feast again lie in Latin, via French. The Latin noun festa was for feasts, holidays, and banquets. It also gives festa to Italian and fiesta to Spanish, so clearly the Romans knew how to party when they spread out over Europe. It transferred directly into Old French where it gained extra meanings for noise, jesting, and fun and you can see its grandchild in the Modern French word fête (party), which has also entered English as a borrowed word, often used to describe an outdoor fundraising event for church or community funds.

By the 1200s a feast was in English as a secular event (see above) and by 1300 it was usually a religious anniversary which didn’t involve fasting. By the late 1300s a feast was a large meal, in public or private, and could describe any enjoyable event. While religious feasts and festivals continue to this day, you can also enjoy a feast purely for the fun of it, neatly bringing us back to the original solemn and joyful definition. Feasts and festivals can be both, or either.

The next word on the teen’s list was January, one which I’ve already covered in my book “How To Get Your Name in the Dictionary” and in this blog post.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. I’m still writing away in CampNaNo’s April 2022 challenge. 25,017 words and counting.

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