Word of the Week – Odyssey

With the new The Odyssey movie out, it’s no big surprise that odyssey is trending on EtymOnline.com. And while I’m well familiar with the classic epic poem by Homer, and I knew that odyssey came from the title character’s name, Odysseus, I’d never actually looked it up.

My first surprise was seeing that odyssey didn’t make its way into English until around 1600, which was far later than I expected. The English came from the Latin Odyssea, which in turn came from the Greek Odysseia.

Also fascinating to me is that the metaphorical sense of “any long and adventurous journey” didn’t join the show until 1889! Much later than I thought.

So what of the hero’s name? That is shrouded in mystery because it’s so old, considered to be “pre-Greek.” Homer’s epic is written in Attic Greek, the oldest form we have, but the stories were handed down verbally long before they were written. Some historians considered that Odysseus’s name might have come from odyssasthai, which means “to be angry, to be grieved, to grumble,” but most etymologists now consider that to be mistaken so consider it what they call “folk etymology.”

One of the reasons we know that it’s pre-Greek is the number of variants, some of which begin with ol- instead of od-, which is how we got Ulysses along with Odysseus.

Have you read the epic poem? (It was one of our first reads for seminar at St. John’s College, after The Iliad.) Have you seen or do you plan to see the movie?