4 min
School Terms
Educational institutions as we know them are largely products of the Medieval and Industrial Ages, but the roots of formal education stretch all the way back to the ancient world, and in fact many of the words we associate with school life have surprising roots in the forgotten past. This Word Stories instalment shines a spotlight on the remarkable historical origins of words associated with modern school life.
school
Schoolwork might not feel like a leisure activity to many people today, but the ancient Greek root of the word school literally means “leisure” (skholē). Hellenistic gentlemen were expected to cultivate both body and mind, so a refreshing trip to a good spa would often include topical seminars as well as workouts and grooming (see gymnasium). In this way, the connotations of skholē came to include extended meanings like “a lecture” or “a group hearing a lecture”. When the Romans later borrowed the term as schola, it lost its original sense of “leisure” entirely and was used even more broadly to describe a place of teaching, a body of teachings, or a group of people who follow certain teachings.
The English derivative school still carries echoes of these Greek roots and Roman innovations. We still talk about teaching venues as schools, and we often talk about intellectual traditions as schools of thought. The extended use of schola as a synonym for “group” in post-classical Latin also passed into English for a while. In Old English, a scola/scole/etc. could be “a company” or “a multitude”. In modern everyday English, this much more general collective sense only really survives in the way we refer to a group of fish as a school of fish.
gymnasium
In ancient Greek, gumnos meant “naked”, and because elite Greek athletes were expected to compete naked, training involved gumnazein (“training in the nude”) at an athletic centre called a gumnasion (“naked place”). The Romans were not nearly so willing to train and compete in the nude, but they adopted the Latinized form gymnasium as a way to describe a place dedicated to public exercise. The word gymnasium first appears in English with reference to these ancient Roman venues, in the 1598 English version of the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus, and today the word is widely used to refer to athletic training facilities. Because ancient gymnasia often hosted public exercises in intellectual culture such as lectures, debates and discussions, the word gymnasium was also carried on in many European languages as a synonym for “school”. This academic sense of the word can sometimes be found in English as well (A. Wood, Atheae Oxonienses, 1691), but the dominant meaning of gymnasium in English has always been connected instead to its original connotations of physical training. In recent centuries, though, everyday usage has opted for the shortened form gym (L. H. Bagg, Four Years at Yale, 1871).
By adding the adjectival suffix -ikos to gymnasion, the ancient Greeks created the adjective gymnastikos (“related to the gymnasium”), which passed with similar connotations into Latin as gymnasticus and English as gymnastic. A gymnastic activity is one you might see at a gymnasium (T. Newton, Direction for Health, 1574), and the nominal derivative gymnastics was coined to describe the kinds of athletic pursuits that require training at a gymnasium (J. Evelyn, State of France, 1652). In modern usage, gymnastics specifically evokes sporting activities like tumbling or the parallel bars that require a specialized gymnasium environment. In ancient Greek, a gumnastēs (“gym person”) was a person who worked at a gymnasium, i.e. a trainer, but when French adopted the term as gymnaste it was extended to mean the “athlete (at the gym)” as well as the “trainer (at the gym)”. When English in turn adopted the term from French as gymnast, it was narrowed again, but applied to the athlete as opposed to the trainer. In English, anybody who trains in gymnastics is a gymnast (R. Ashley, Interchangeable Course, 1594).
cafeteria
In Spanish, coffee is café and a coffee vendor might therefore be called a cafetero/cafetera. By further extension, coffee shops were called cafeterías in Mexican Spanish, and when English speakers first borrowed this term as cafeteria/cafetria, it therefore referred to a place where one might sit and drink a coffee (J. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in the Russian and Turkish Empires, 1839). Over time, though, the connotations of the name drifted. In Mexican Spanish, the word cafetería was applied more widely to include any relatively casual restaurant that offered light meals and alcoholic drinks (H. Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 1916), and the English derivative cafeteria has come to refer specifically to places that offer some kind of self-service (Modern Language Notes, 1923)—usually in institutional settings like office buildings or schools.
academy/academia
In Greek mythology, Akadēmos (Academus in later Latin tradition) was an Athenian king. He seems to have been best known for placating the vengeful divine heroes Castor and Pollux when they came to Athens looking for their abducted sister. For saving the city, the king was himself venerated as a hero in a sacred grove called the Akadēmia in his honour. When the Greek philosopher Plato later founded his famous school in this area, it became popularly known as Plato’s Academy (Akadēmia in Greek and then Academia in Latin).
In post-classical Latin, the name of Plato’s iconic school was further applied to the kind of teaching one might hear in such a school, and eventually to the teaching venue itself. Centuries later, English writers followed suit by referring to both Plato’s school as the Academia (J. Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 1439) or the Academy (T. Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651), and. They, too, extended the meaning of Academy to include the kind of teaching associated with Plato (W. Thomas, Historie of Italie, 1549) and eventually any institution of higher learning (R. Greene, Frier Bacon, 1592). More recently, the variant form academia has been similarly repurposed as a way to refer to scholarship and the scholarly world in general (The Installation of John Huston Finley, LL. D. as President of the College of the City of New York, 1903).
The word academy has also found a life outside scholarly circles. For a long time, the English noun academy has also been used to refer to any formal organization dedicated to culture and learning (as seen in the English version of M. Stephen Guazzo’s etiquette book Ciuile Conuersation, 1581). And so, for example, the prestigious Academy Awards (commonly known as the “Oscars”) are not intended to recognize excellence in scholarship. They are instead awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a professional organization dedicated to promoting technical and artistic excellence in the film industry.
