Today's Word "Odium"
Published in Vocabulary
odium \O-dee-ehm\(noun) - The stain of deepest dishonor, such as disgrace from evil behavior; hatred or repulsion elicited by degenerate acts.
"Jacobinism was destroyed; its party, as a party, was extinguished; its tenets were involved in almost universal unpopularity and odium..." -- George Walker, 'The Vagabond'
Today's word is also the Latin word for hate, from the verb odi "I hate," distantly related to the root meaning an odor. It emerges in Armenian ateam "I hate," but isn't visible outside the Romance languages which devolved from Latin. English "annoy" was borrowed from Old French anoier "to annoy, bore," a descendant of Latin inodiare "to make odious" from the phrase in odio "odious," containing in "in" and "odio," the Ablative Case of "odium." Borrowing this particular French word was a cottage industry at one point in the history of the English language. We also created an English word, noisome "offensive, harmful" from it by dropping the initial vowel and adding the English suffix -some. Then, when "anoier" went on to become ennuyer "to bore" in French, we borrowed the noun from this verb: ennui "boredom."
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