The Perplexing History of Perplexed

Hello,

I have a fondness for the letter Z, as I’ve mentioned here before. The letter X isn’t as neglected, but it’s not far off, which got me thinking about perplexed. It doesn’t have an obvious word root from its spelling or pronunciation, so where did it come from?

It turns out that tracing the history of perplexed is like pulling an end of yarn from a jumble and making the knots worse thanks to the pressure.

A myriad of yarns

I’m currently reading Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary so I began my search with him. He tells me that the adjective perplex comes from French and the Latin verb perplexus and that it means intricate or difficult but I’ve never heard of perplex being an adjective.

The verb to perplex predates Johnson. It entered English in the late 1500s and it meant to puzzle or bewilder someone. However the verb was formed from the adjective perplex which arrived in the late 1300s, so we’ve had the word, and its variants, for a long time. The idea of my tangle of yarn being confused and intricate fits well.

The route back to Latin isn’t straightforward. The per (through) has Proto-Indo European roots and plexus means entangled. It’s the past tense of the Latin verb plectere (to twine, braid, or fold) from a root word about plaiting. Again this one seems like it would work well with yarn, or hair. The part that confuses the experts is that there was no exact root verb for perplexing and that the adjective came before the verb – not the normal route for words to enter language. It’s a case of a past-participle form attested generations before the verb itself – a little language mystery that still perplexes experts.

With time the adjective perplex became obsolete but we retained perplexed and by the 1600s its meaning had expanded from puzzling to being intricate, involved, entangled, or difficult to understand. Which is why we would now say that a mystery novel had a perplexing plot or that a jigsaw puzzled had perplexed us.

I love the fact that the tangled history of perplexed is itself both tangled and perplexing. It’s always wise to pull with care on the ends of yarn, and on the histories of words.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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