Homonyms, Etymologically Speaking: Z

Many words have two meanings, sometimes more, which are often very different. Such words have identical spelling and pronunciation, they are known as homonyms. Here I continue an A to Z list of such words and look at how that word came to have two different meanings.

Z is for ..... well it isn't for anything as there isn't a single homonym beginning with that letter. So let's have some fun with etymologies of words beginning with Z and we will begin with....

Zero came into use from Arabic notation, for the earlier Roman numerals had no symbol representing zero. It comes from the Arabic sifr 'cipher' and is related to Sanskrit sunya-m 'empty place, desert, naught'.

Zeal is from the Latin zelus 'emulation'. They got it from the Greek zelos, a word used mainly in church to mean 'ardour, rivalry'; and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ya 'seek, request, desire'.

Zigzag is a fairly recent addition to all languages, coming to English from the French around 1670, and thought to have originated in Germany as ZickZack, used there to refer to German military siege approaches. When it first came to England it was applied solely to types of garden path. Incidentally there is a ZigZag Road in Tadworth, Surrey which is almost perfectly straight.