scherenschnitte & nunatak

For the second year in a row, co-champions won the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee: Vanya Shivashankar landed scherenschnitte and Gokul Venkatachalam stuck nunatak.  If etymology was ever useful, it’s certainly in spelling bees. Let’s have a quick look at origin of the winning words.

Scherenschnitte

For this word, I turned to Merriam-Webster (whose own Peter Sokolowski offered superb live-tweeting of the bee) online. According to Merriam-Wesbter, scherenschnitte is the “the art of cutting paper into decorative designs,” and, as you might have guessed, is from the German. It literally means “scissors cut.” The online entry continues:

German, plural of scherenschnitt, literally, scissors cut, from scheren, plural of schere scissors (from Middle High German schære, plural, from Old High German skār) + schnitt cut, from Middle High German snit, from Old High German; akin to Old English snid cut, from the Germanic root of snīthan to cut

In the first part of the word, you might recognize a cognate, the English shear. This historical linguistics have cut all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker-, a hugely prolific root meaning “to cut.” Share, sharp, shore? That’s just the beginning. In the second part of the word, I’ll point you to any you know who goes by Schneider, a “tailor” (think, “cutter”) in German.

Nunatak

Nunatak comes from the Greenlandic, an Eskimo language spoken in Greenland. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it joins nuna, “land,” and tak, “thing pertaining to,” yielding “an isolated piece of rock projecting above the surface of inland ice.” Also offering excellent live-tweeting of the event, Ben Zimmer of Vocabulary.com offers “a hill or mountain completely surrounded by glacial ice.” Words depend so much on context, no?

m ∫ r ∫