Word of the Week – Spy

Tomorrow, I’ll be celebrating the release of The Spy Keeper of Marseille. This is the second book of mine with the word spy in the title (along with Circle of Spies), but would you believe I’ve never featured the word here before?? Gasp! This must be rectified immediately! 😉

Spy has quite a long history in the English language! Both the noun and verb forms date from the mid-1200s, and though we likely got our version as a loan-word from French, most European languages share a very similar word for this, and they all trace back to the oldest Germanic language, from the root word spehan. The German, in turn, traced back to that first indo-european language we appreciate as PIE, and its root of spek-, which meant “to observe.”

Which is, of course, what the word means–to observe, or one who observes, often through concealment. To investigate, to watch carefully. By the mid-1400s, the verb had developed the sense of “to play the spy, conduct surveillance.”

In the noun side of things, the term spymaster dates from 1943 and was the inspiration for “spy keeper” in my novel…we loved that word but decided that my female spymaster wouldn’t want the masculine “master”…but “spymistress” just didn’t do the job, LOL. So we went with “keeper” instead. Unique, and I love it!

The game “I spy” also dates from the 1940s.