• cenotaph •
Pronunciation: sin-ê-tæf • Hear it!Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: An empty tomb or monument to someone who is buried elsewhere.
Notes: We see far more cenotaphs in our cities than we hear their name, which is today's Good Word. A cenotaph may be an empty tomb or simply a memorial to the dead that is not placed over their grave. The adjective is cenotaphic. Some have used today's noun as a verb, as 'to cenotaph the memry of someone'.
In Play: Most often, cenotaphs commemorate fallen soldiers whose bodies were not recovered from the battleground: "It will be a glorious day when we no longer have reason to raise cenotaphs to those fallen in war." The purpose of a cenotaph, of course, is to prevent our forgetting the person or people it is dedicated to: "The president has donated a huge portrait of himself for the foyer as a cenotaph to his work here."
Word History: English borrowed this word from French cénotaphe in the 17th century. French inherited it from Latin cenotaphium, a word the Romans borrowed from Greek kenotaphion "empty tomb", a compound made up of kenos "empty" + taphos "tomb". We do not know where the Greeks picked up kenos or taphos. Armenian has an adjective sin "empty", which suggests kenos was originally Proto-Indo-European, but we find no evidence of it elsewhere. We do find taphos in two other English words: epitaph, which originally appeared only on graves, and bibliotaph "book-hoarder", someone who accumulates books without putting them to use. Obviously the latter was uttered for the first time tongue-in-cheek.
