The etymological sound and fury of “outrage”

Politically, the sources of outrage these days are innumerable and inexorable. Etymologically, meanwhile, the source of the word outrage is inconspicuous and unexpected.

One would reasonably suppose outrage, due to its senses of “insult” or “injury” and “the intense feeling of anger or resentment” they arouse, would be a simple combination of the prefix out-, “in a surpassing or exceeding manner,” and rage, “violent, uncontrollable anger,” and so denoting “extreme rage.”

In fact, it’s the other way around: the “fury” of outrage is due to its associated sound, if you will.

The etymology of outrage

English first vented its outrage spleen in the early 1300s, when the word entered the language from the French utrage, meaning “transgression, insult.” Older forms in French, including oltrage and ultrage, evince that the word lost an etymologically critical letter in its evolution. 

Behind the French utrage is, ultimately, the Latin adverb and preposition ultrā, “beyond.” Ultrā became ultre and outre in French, to which the language added the suffix -age, a prevalent and versatile noun-forming suffix. English has made ample use of these roots, ultrā and –age, in its own tongue.

So, outrage is, etymologically, “ultra-age”—that is, “going too far,” as the great British philologist Ernest Weekley perfectly put it in English idiom.

The older meaning of outrage in English, “an act of violence” or “gross indignity,” survives today, though it’s ceding ground to the sense of the ensuing “anger” such an offense incites. This narrower sense the Oxford English Dictionary records in the 1570s, noting it as an “originally Scottish” usage—and, indeed, influenced by its unetymological association with the word rage.

Word fact: The phenomenon, whereby a less familiar word is changed to conform with a more familiar one, is known as reanalysis or folk etymology. 

Outrageous is evidenced by the 1320s, based on the French adjective form of utrage. Verb senses of outrage appeared in English by the late 1300s, now primarily occurring as the past participle, outraged. 

Speaking of past participles, the adjective outré, meaning “weird, startling, unorthodox,” comes from that form of the French verb outrer, “to go beyond limits, to push to excess.”

The etymology of rage

As for the root of rage? Psychologically, I recommend you talk to your therapist. Etymologically, it also has, for me at least, an unexpected origin. 

Recorded in the early 1300s, rage ultimately comes, via French, from the Latin rabiēs, meaning “madness, fury, ferocity”—as well as its selfsame English derivative rabies, a viral disease causing convulsive aggression in dogs and other mammals. 

Rabiēs, in turn, is based on the Latin verb rabere, “to rave, be mad.” The verb also produced rabidus, “mad, furious, raving,” which is what it meant as the English rabid in the late 1500s before extending to “affected with rabies” by the middle of the 1600s.

Word fact: Rage and rabies are known as doublets: they are two words in a language that derive from the same root but developed along different paths.

Scandal and slander are, aptly, also doublets, as I’ve previously explored on the blog.

Beyond outrage?

Today, outrage can feel like its own viral disease—at least inasmuch as we become addicted to it by doomscrolling the news. Perhaps its etymology  in the Latin ultrā can be instructive, exhorting us to go “beyond” our screens to the streets, beyond emotion to action. Beyond, even, digital isolation to more connection in the flesh.