• suspire •
Pronunciation: sê-spair • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb
Meaning: 1. To sigh, take a deep breath. 2. To breathe (out), respire. 3. (Obsolete) To yearn after, long for.
Notes: Here is a word that comes in handy if you need a more high-falutin' word than sigh or a polysyllabic word. It is akin to aspire, inspire, conspire, and respire, so its descendants bear a family resemblance to all these: the action noun is suspiration and the adjective, suspirious.
In Play: The basic sense of suspire is "to sigh": "When he saw the damage done by his efforts, he suspired deeply, lay down, and took a nap." This word is mostly poetic, like Robert Frosts' "Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight":
"There was one time and only the one
When dust really took in the sun
And from that one intake of fire
All creatures still warmly suspire."
Word History: Today's Good Word was kidnapped by English directly from Latin suspirare "to draw a deep breath, to sigh", composed of an assimilated form of sub "under" + spirare "to breathe". The most closely resemblant Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word to Latin spirare is (s)peis- "to blow". The shift from the final [s] to [r] could be the result of rhotacization, common in Latin. The shift from "blow" to "breathe" could be accounted for by the old belief that visible breath in winter was your soul or spirit. Latin spiritus "breath, spirit, soul" is the noun from spirare; English also pinched it for its spirit. If spirare does come from (s)peis-, we find further evidence of this PIE word in Sanskrit piččora "flute", Russian piščat' "to squeak, squeal", Albanian piskat "to scream". Danish and Norwegian fjerte, Icelandic freta, and the English word corresponding to the sense of "cut wind" all share the same source and stinky meaning.
