Getting Down to the History of Inferno

Hello,

This week’s word, with a nod to our current hot weather, is inferno. It has been an English word for hell since 1834 thanks to Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. Dante wrote in everyday Italian (primarily in Tuscan dialect but he ranged about) and inferno is a direct borrowing from that.

Gather around Wordfoolery’s firepit

Inferno came to Italian from Late Latin infernus (hell) and in classical Latin the way to describe something as lying underground or in lower regions (think underworld in general) ultimately from the prefix infra-. Infra used in this way brings a meaning of below or under and has links to earlier root words and even Sanskrit adnah (below).

Infra is sometimes used as an opposite to super, especially in science fiction and infra dig means something or somebody is demeaning or beneath one in British English slang (although I think that might be old-fashioned for today’s teens).

Other variants of inferno exist too. Anything infernal relates to the underworld (since the late 1300s). In Latin inferi were the dead, the residents of the infernal regions. Readers of Harry Potter books may recall the inferi encountered by Dumbledore and Harry in an underground cave, who were corpses re-animated by dark magic.

Associations with the Christian idea of hell added extra meanings to these words. By the early 1400s you might call something infernal if it was devilish or hateful. By 1600 something infernal was suitable for hell and by 1928 a large fire was called an inferno. Hollywood gave use the original “Towering Inferno” movie in 1974 – one I watched at too young an age with an older sibling and gave me a healthy fear of fire in skyscrapers.

Thankfully thus far we’ve avoided wildfire infernos in Ireland during this heat (thanks to the cooling influence of the Atlantic) but it doesn’t feel like that today.

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

Grace (@Wordfoolery)