Sport and the Spanish for the same, deporte, are closer than they seem.

The English sport comes from the French for the same… desporte — notice it is the same as the Spanish, except with an extra “s” (that’s a pattern that we’ll explain in the French version of this page one day!).

You can see the connection to the English clearly if we remember the “s” and we remember the de- prefix was lost over time. Thus, the s-p-r-t maps to the Spanish (d)-(s)-p-r-t.

The French desporte (and thus the English sport) and its Spanish equivalent deporte both come from the same Latin root: des- meaning “away” and portare, meaning, “to carry”.

Thus deporte, and sport, is also related to puerto (“port”) and portero (“super”, in the sense of, “superintendent”) in Spanish and port in English.

Lazar (Spanish for “to tie, such as with a ribbon”) comes from the Latin laqueum, meaning “a tie, such as a noose”. From that same root, we get the English… lasso. A lasso, after all, is really a cable that can be used to tie someone or something up…!

The l-z of lazar clearly maps to the l-ss of lasso.

The Spanish for “a hit”, Golpe, comes from the Greek for the same, Colaphus. We can see the transition in the g-l-p of golpe mapping to the c-l-ph of colaphus.

The more interesting part, however, is that, from the same root we also get the French, and English, word coup — as in, a coup d’état. Coup is just colaphus, but with the middle -l- sound disappearing in French.

So, a coup d’état is just a big hit against the state!

Mientras (Spanish for “while”), comes from the Latin dum interim, meaning, “in the meantime,” which itself comes from the earlier basic prefix, inter-. Interim has entered formal English speech meaning the same, of course.

The n-t-r root is visible in both mientras and interim — but it is less obvious because of the m– opening sound, from the lost prefix dum (“out of”).

Salir, the common Spanish word meaning, “to leave” sounds like it has nothing to do with anything. Or does it?

Salir comes from the Latin salire meaning the same, “to jump”. Surprise, surprise.

From this same Latin root was get a bunch of fun English words, including:

• Assault — an assault is literally someone jumping out at you!
• Assail — the same as an assault!
• Salient — that which stands out at you is, literally, that which jumps out at you!

We also get another Spanish word from the same root: saltar (“to jump”). You can see the s-l mapping across all descendants of the word!

Sacudir, Spanish for “to shake” comes from the Latin for the same, quatere.

From that same root, we get a bunch of English –cussion words, including:

• Discussion — that’s when you shake up what you’re talking about!
• Concussion — that’s when you shake someone so hard, they get hurt!
• Percussion — that’s when you shake the drums a lot!

You can see the s-c in reverse in the Spanish sacudir and the –cussion words.

Entender (Spanish for, “to understand”; and much more common than the other word for the same, comprender) comes from the Latin tendere, “to stretch out.”

From this root, we get the English extend — which is just a form of stretching.

We can also see how stretching became understanding if we remember that, to really understand something, you need to stretch your brain and creativity to the limits.

The t-n-d root is clear in both words as well. From the same root, we get other similar words that are metaphors for stretching out: intend, to tender, and even tentative

Feliz (Spanish for “happiness”) comes from the Latin felix, meaning both “happy” and “fertile”.

It is indeed curious how, linguistically, happiness and having children and plentiful crops are deeply intertwined.

From the same root, we get the English felicity, which we can see in the f-l-z to f-l-c mapping very clearly.

Most distantly, we also have the English fecund and fetus.