ONLINE
ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARY:
- early 15c., from L. Titan, from Gk. Titan, member of a mythological race of giants who attempted to scale heaven by piling Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa but were overthrown by Zeus and the gods. They descended from Titan, elder brother of Kronos. Perhaps from tito "sun, day," which is probably a loan-word from a language of Asia Minor. Sense of "person or thing of enormous size" first recorded 1828. Applied to planet Saturn's largest satellite in 1868; it was discovered 1655 by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who named it Saturni Luna "moon of Saturn."
- adjective suffix, "having to do with, having the nature of, being, made of, caused by, similar to" (in chemistry, indicating a higher valence than names in -ous), from French -ique and directly from Latin -icus, which in many cases represents Greek -ikos "in the manner of; pertaining to." From PIE *-(i)ko, which also yielded Slavic -isku, adjectival suffix indicating origin, the source of the -sky (Russian -skii) in many surnames.
No comments:
Post a Comment