• sacrilegious •
Printable Version Pronunciation: sæ-krê-li-jês • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: Profaning or desecrating that which is held to be sacred.
Notes: This word is especially good at trapping even the best of spellers. Despite the obvious semantic relation, today's Word History shows that this word is wholly unrelated to religious. This explains what seems to be the metathesis (switch) of the [e] and [i]: sacrilegious vs. religious. Today's word comes from sacrilege "desecration, profanation", not religious!
In Play: In most religions it is considered sacrilegious to ustter the name of the deity. In fact, it might be sacrilegious to play around with this word but let's see what we can do with it: "It is considered sacrilegious to mention the name of a competitor's product in our office." In the world of sports, members of the all-male Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters Golf Tournament, still think the admission of women to the club is sacrilegious. Or so it would seem.
Word History: Today's is yet another word from Latin via French, this time from sacrilegus "someone who steals sacred things", a compound based on sacer "sacred" + legere "to pick out, collect" (and, later, "count, speak"). The meaning of the PIE root *leg-/*log- roves over a broad semantic spectrum: "pick, collect" (Latin lignum "firewood, that which is collected"), "speak, word" (lexicon), "read" (legible), and "law" (legislature). "Read" and "speak" are trivially related, since reading was often done aloud in the past. The leap from "word" to "law" is quite curious, though: was law seen as a collection of things or as The Word, as the law of God is seen? What do you think?
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