What’s behind the word “voice”?

On Monday, we lost one of our great actors—and one of our great voices. James Earl Jones, a powerful performer on stage and screen, passed away at the age of 93. 

Many of us will remember him, of course, as the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars or Mufasa from the Lion King, although those are but two roles of his prolific career. 

And it’s all the more incredible and inspiring that so much of Jones’s legacy will resound in his voice—considering how, as a child, he had to overcome a stutter so severe he silenced himself altogether.

As our culture reflects on the man behind the voice, I’ll reflect here about the roots behind the word voice.

The etymology of the word voice

The Oxford English Dictionary first records voice in English around 1300. Voice was borrowed into English from the Anglo-Norman French voice, which developed from older French forms, including voiz and vois. 

Today, the French for “voice” is voix. And that word-ending letter X—written though not pronounced, as is ever true of French—calls back to its root, the Latin vōx. Like its descendants, the Latin vōx had various meanings: “voice, sound, tone, try, call, written or spoken word, utterance, saying, language, accent,” among others. (In Classical Latin, vōx would sound like wokes.) 

You may recognize vōx in the Latin phrase, vox populi, “voice of the people.” The Latin vōx also directly inspired the name of the news website, Vox. Remember Magnavox, the electronics maker? That brand name literally means “great voice.” 

An occasion for some grammar

Now, time for a little Latin class. As many of you may know or recall, Latin nouns take different endings—called cases—to indicate their grammatical function. Cases are a kind of inflection. 

Vōx is its so-called nominative case, used when a word is the subject of a verb. Vōcis is the genitive case, used to show possession (“of the voice”). Vōcem is the accusative, or the object of a verb or some prepositions. This form, vōcem, is considered to be the form in which the Latin form transitions into French as the Romance languages came to shed Latin’s complex case system. 

The stem of the Latin noun vōx is vōc-, and it’s this main part onto which parts are added to form new meanings and words. A stem can also be called a root.

Why so much grammar? Because it’s good for you. 

It also helps explain how, in etymology, we begin with a noun like vōx and end up with a word like voice—and many other words derived from it, as we direct our attention to next.

English words derived from or related to the Latin root of voice

Ultimately derived from the Latin noun vōx is the adjective vōcālis, source of vocal, to which we added in English the verb-forming suffix -ize to produce vocalize.

Vocal also produces vowel, through the French vouel. While the shape and sense of vow has a lot of affinity here, vow is actually from the same Latin root as vote—still filtered through French, however.

The stem of vōx, vōc-, also produces vociferous, literally “voice-bearing,” and univocal, “one voice.”

Closely related to vōx is the verb vocāre, meaning “to call, name, summon.” The etymological voice of this verb—through various derivations and combinations, especially with different prepositions you can easily identify—has reverberated in English vocabulary. 

Vouch and voucher may ultimately come from the Latin vocāre. 

And then we have—so near and dear to me and, if you’ve read this far, you—the word vocabulary. 

Vocabulary, which originally had meanings of “wordlist” or “dictionary,” comes from the Latin vocābulum, a “word, term, name, noun.” Vocābulum is based on vocāre and -bulum, a suffix that named instruments in the broad, “means of doing” sense of that word. (I have a mind to give etymology its own treatment.)

“Voices” across Indo-European 

The Latin vōx doesn’t make a solitary sound in the Indo-European languages. Historical linguists base vōx in the Proto-Indo-European *wekw-, “to speak,” one of many roots concerned with speech/speaking in that ancestral, hypothetical tongue. Here are a few notable derivatives across Indo-European languages:

• Sanskrit vāc
• German giwahanen 
• Greek epos
• Old Irish focal

Old English, for its part, had, among some other words, stefn, which may be connected to the Greek source of stoma, meaning “mouth.”

The Greek epos, meaning “word” or “speech,” ultimately yields calliope—”beautiful voice”—and epic, based on an adjective referring to “epic poems,” which began as long songs about heroes of history and legend.

Beautiful voice. Epic. What resonant and relevant etymological connections, indeed, for James Earl Jones, whose legacy will live on—in voice and so much more.