The word sacrilegious, describing something that violates the sacred, is tricky to spell. It’s easy to assume that it contains the word religious, but it doesn’t. Sacrilegious derives from sacrilegus, a Latin word that means a stealer of sacred things. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Why Sacrilegious Is Not Spelled Like Religious”
I had a knockdown drag out fight with my spell check the other day.
I was trying to spell the word sacrilegious.
Can you spell it?
Ooh, now you’ve got me on the spot.
I know.
My fingers can do it, I think.
Really?
I want to say it’s S-A-C-R-I-L-I-G-I-O-U-S.
Oh, gosh, you’re so close.
You’re closer than I was.
I was spelling it S-A-C-R-E-L-I-G-I-O-U-S.
But that’s not it either.
We’re both wrong.
What is it?
S-A-C-R-I-L-E-G-I-O-U-S.
Oh, so the R and E and the I are reversed as they would be in the word religious.
Yes, that’s what I thought.
And I thought I am wrong, and I found a bug in spell check.
But no, it is S-A-C-R-I-L-E-G-I-O-U-S.
And the reason is that, you know, you have the sacred part at the beginning.
But the earliest sense of sacrilege back in the early 14th century was the theft or misuse or desecration of holy things.
And the ligus in there comes from the Latin word legere, which means to pluck or take.
So it’s like you’re taking something that’s sacred away.
And so that’s why it’s not I-G-I-O-U-S.
So it’s not actually the word religious in there at all.
That’s what I’m trying to say.
Thank you, Grant.
That’s what I’m trying to say.
Originally from the French, I would guess.
Passed into English from the French.
No, from the Latin, actually.
Yeah.
But I was so sure I was right and spellcheck was wrong.
The spellcheck is not that reliable.
So I would always fight with it, give it a chance.
But you check some other dictionaries and square it away.
Absolutely.
Yeah, but I’m still going to have trouble with that.
We all have words that we just keep going back to the dictionary and looking up.
I was even having a hard time finding it in the dictionary.
The worst thing happened to me recently.
I lost my custom dictionary on Microsoft Word.
Oh, that is the worst thing ever.
13 years of me adding things to the dictionary.
Oh, poof.
How did that happen?
I did an update and cleared out a folder.
Oh, your own personal dictionary?
Yeah, I think I might have it on an old backup.
We’ll see.
Oh, gosh, I hope so.
My sympathies.
Modern problems.
For us, that’s sad.
That’s a big deal.
Yeah.
That’s like losing your Christmas card list.
