The Alchemical Origins of Quintessential

Hello,

Although I’ve already covered most of my favourite words here on the blog, sometimes I’ll think “did I do that one?” and discover I somehow missed the history of a word I love. This morning I had that discovery with quintessential.

Quintessential is a way of describing something as being the most perfect example of its type. Your favourite tipple might be a quintessential glass of red wine, or your favourite James Bond actor might be quintessential casting. My homemade vanilla fudge which I only make for Christmas (because the ingredients aren’t exactly health food) is the quintessential festive feast in our house.

I was surprised to discover quintessential’s roots lie in alchemy.

Yes, alchemy, the medieval origins of modern chemistry but mostly obsessed with finding eternal life or turning lead into gold.

Quintessence arrived in English before quintessential. Let’s start there. It was used in the early 1400s in alchemy and philosophy as a literal term for the fifth essence. Quin means five here, as it does in quintuplet. It’s a borrowing from Latin’s quintus (fifth), via Old French. Essence followed the same route from essentia in Latin (being or essence) although in that case it came from an earlier Greek word ousia (essence) with a Proto Indo European root es (to be).

The Greeks had a hand in the concept of quintessence. They had a term pempte ousia (ether). Aristotle added the idea of ether to the four elements (water, earth, air, and fire). This fifth element was believed to be naturally bright, incorruptible, and moved in circles. It was a pure essence of all things and was the substance of heavenly bodies. Basically he believed quintessence was star dust. Alchemists immediately wanted to extract it and examine it.

The fifth element, the ether, and the quintessence are all the same thing and no, those alchemists didn’t turn lead into gold and they didn’t extract quintessence either.

The quintessential Wordfoolery

By the 1560s quintessence had acquired a second meaning – the pure essence of a situation or person. This came from the idea of extracting a small quantity of the essential virtues of something. It’s this meaning we use most today.

By the 1600s we’d added quintessential to the dictionary to describe this concept – the purest, the most refined, the very nature of quintessence – we’ve been using it ever since in a variety of ways which the alchemists would detest.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)