Every abstract word was once a physical act. Before consider meant to think carefully, it meant to study the stars. Before influence meant social power, it was a fluid streaming down from celestial bodies into human ones.
Language carries its history in its body. This is a living library of words that have made that journey — from embodied, cosmological origins into the purely mental — though the original matter is still there if you look.
Many entries refer to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) — the reconstructed ancestor language spoken somewhere in the Eurasian steppe thousands of years before Greek, Latin, or English existed. No one wrote it down; linguists infer it by working backward from patterns across dozens of descendant languages. Roots marked with an asterisk — *med-, *yugom — were never written, only inferred. They are the ghosts inside the words.
Know a word with an interesting embodied or cosmological origin? Share it and we'll consider adding it to the library.
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We'll look into its origins.