Cadastre

[Dr. Goodword]

• cadastre •

Pronunciation: kê-dæs-têr • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. A register of heads, yokes, or other units into which the Roman provinces were divided for the purposes of a head or land tax. 2. A public register showing details of ownership and land value, kept for purposes of taxation.

Notes: Some dictionaries carry a variant spelling, cadaster, which might be taken as the US spelling if we follow the centre - center model. However, neither Merriam-Webster nor the Oxford English Dictionary have entries with this spelling, so the original spelling must prevail around the English-speaking world. The adjective for either spelling is cadastral.

In Play: Cadastre is a lovelier if outdated word for "register". It is still used occasionally today: "In the course of time, notaries accumulated quite a cadastre of legal records, which they meticulously maintained." It was a means of keeping up with the taxable population: "Algernon couldn't find his name anywhere in the county cadastre, which explained why he wasn't expected to submit a county tax return."

Word History: Today's Good Word was swiped from French, which simply modified Italian catastro, the descendant of Old Italian catastico. Apparently, Old Italian obtained its word from Late Greek katastichon "notebook", comprising kata "down(ward)" (also found in catalogue) + stichos "row, line", >. Little is known about the origin of kata. The now extinct IE language Hittite had a preposition katta "down(ward), under", so it must have been a PIE word that didn't survive the scrape of the ages. Stichos is the noun from steikhein "to march in order", which was passed down to Greek from PIE steigh- "to go (up), rise, step", source also of Sanskrit stignoti "mounts, rises", Lithuanian staiga "suddenly", Russian -stignut' "reach", and Welsh taith "journey". (Let's now thank Lynn Morris, who has been with us for a decade, for seeing all the possibilities of today's nifty Good Word.)

[Philip Hudson]

Cadastre is a new word to me. I plan to meditate on it a spell. It is certainly a lovelier word than "register" and beats the Doomsday Book hands down. I can't imagine it in my conversational vocabulary but there might be room for it in my writing vocabulary. But then it might only rate my recognition vocabulary. Time will tell. Whatever its ultimate fate, I thank the Good Doctor for presenting it to us.

[George Kovac]

"Cadastre" invokes fond memories for me.

In 1992 I lived and worked in Kyiv, an expectant and uncertain time as the Soviet Union had just dissolved. Real estate ownership--a focus of mine as a practicing attorney--was largely terra incognita in a country where most property had been collectivized generations earlier.

But there existed a land registry, of sorts. In English, it was called the "cadastre," a pleasant sounding word I had not heard before. However, the cadastre was never the final word, unlike land registries in western market economies. One of the few (only?) new buildings in Kyiv at time was a nice apartment building hurriedly built by a western company to house its expats. The developer leased the land from the government agency that appeared to own the property. The mayor claimed the city owned the land, and that the ground rent should be paid to him, cadastre be damned. When the developer balked at paying the mayor because the cadastre did not support his claim to ownership, the mayor sent bulldozers, and in a matter of minutes removed the entire street in front of the apartment building, including the sidewalk and utilities. Well, the mayor did control the streets.