Origins of words

Lens.

A lens may be a work of precision but its origins come from the humblest of vegetables, the lentil seed.

The Latin for lentil is in fact lens.  Renaissance scientists, needing a name for the curved platelet of glass used to aid eyesight, focus the sun’s rays, study the stars, or build a microscope, could think of nothing better than the resemblance between the shape of this object and that of the lentil seed.  Accordingly, they gave it the New Latin name of lens – simply, a glass lentil seed.

Money from Jupiter?

Money, as a means of exchange and a store of value, has an ancient history: the first coins were in use in the Kingdom of Lydia, in western Turkey, around 700 BC.  The word itself has a lineage that is only slightly less venerable.

It goes back to the days of ancient Rome, when the city fathers decided that they needed a mint.  The chosen site was on the Capitoline Hill, in a temple dedicated to the goddess Juno, the wife and sister of Jupiter.

She was sometimes known as Juno Moneta, the ‘warning’ goddess – perhaps the Romans felt that she would warn them if their finances became shaky.  (Moneta comes from the Latin verb monere, ‘to warn or advise’, from which we get a whole array of English words, for example admonish, demonstrate, monitor, monster, monument, muster, premonition, and summon.)  The word moneta therefore came to refer to a mint, and then to what a mint produces – money.  And so, through Old French, our word money derived.