• ubiquity •
Pronunciation: yu-bi-kwê-ti • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun, mass
Meaning: The status of being common, found everywhere, not rare.
Notes: First, remember that this Good Word does not begin with Y even though you can hear this sound in the U. It has an adjective, ubiquitous, that is more ubiquitous than the noun. The adjective wears the adverb suffix -ly comfortably for things that pop up ubiquitously wherever you go.
In Play: The English adverb everywhere does not have a correlate adjective or noun, though we often need them. We speak of iPods that you see everywhere. Today's word and its adjective fills that lacuna nicely: "The ubiquity of iPods is a recent phenomenon that looks to last, perhaps forming a triumvirate with death and taxes."
Word History: Today's Good Word is built around the Latin compound adverb, ubi-que "everywhere", made up of ubi "where" + -que "and". Ubi started out in Proto-Indo-European, the language that most Indian and European languages developed from, as *kwo-bhi "where to?" This word became cubi in Latin but somewhere along the way the [k] sound was lost, leaving ubi "where?" The original kwo turned out to be who in English but kto in Russian, two words that sound totally different today but 6000 years ago were the same.
