We have already discussed how pollo (Spanish for chicken) and poultry are related. But it gets more interesting!

From the same root is also… pool. Yes, pool! How so?

Well, in medieval France, they used to play the jeu de la poule, the game of the chicken. Everyone would pool their money together, and throw stones at the chicken to see it run in a different direction each time, a bit like how you… play pool today! Yes, this is where the game pool comes from!

Desmayar, meaning “to faint” is — unexpectedly! — related to the English word, dismay.

Both come from the same Old French root, esmaier, which meant “to trouble, disturb”. (This, in turn, comes from the Latin ex-magare, in which the magare means, “to be powerful” and is related to the English, “might” and “may.”)

Thus, both fainting and being in total shock (dismayed!) are both just ancient manifestations of being troubled at something.

The Spanish tener (to hold) comes from the Latin tenere for the same.

From the same root tenere, we get the English tenet — think about it, you hold your beliefs.

And it gets even better: from tenere, we also get the English suffix -tain, as in maintain, sustain, contain, detain, obtain, and entertain. And the -tain words map almost identically to the Spanish suffix of the same, the same -tener!

For example, mano, the Spanish for hand, is the same mano in maintain (or mantener, in Spanish) — which thus literally means, “to hold in your hand”!

Remo (Spanish for the very common word “oar”) is a cousin of, well, the English row.

Remo comes from the Latin for the same, remus, while the English came from the German ruejen; both of those come from Proto-Indo-European *ere, meaning “to row”.

We can see the r- maps to the r- in each and it does make sense. After all, you do use an oar to row.

Spanish for “lawyer,” abogado is a cousin of the English uncommon synonym for the same, advocate (think of it in the noun sense).

Both come from the same Latin root: advocatus, which is a combination of ad- (“towards”) and vocare (“to call”: think of voice, vocal, vocation — literally, your calling!). So a lawyer, or advocate, literally meant, “one called [to help others]”.

Although the sound mappings may not be obvious at first, we can see that the a-b-g-d of abogado maps to the a-v-c-t of advocate.

We’ve already discussed desayuno (“breakfast”): breakfast is the break-fast, just like des- (“anti”) ayuno (“fast”)!

However, there’s an interesting addition to the story: dinner.

The English dinner originally comes from the French for breakfast, which is almost the same as the Spanish. Both are from Latin and meant the same: desjunare. Thus, we can see over time that the Latin for break-fast (dis– + ieiunus) became “breakfast” in both French and Spanish and then, the French transformed into the English dinner while maintaining the same meaning in Spanish.

Therefore, we can see the d-(s)-n of desayuno map to the d-n of dinner.

But all of this suggests a question: how did breakfast (the first meal of the day) turn into dinner (the last meal of the day)?

Easy: breakfast kept on getting later and later — until it was dinner!

At first it was eating in the morning: breaking the fast of the night. Then, over time, the big fast-breaking meal would happen around 2pm. Then eventually it turned into our 6pm dinnertime.

We see this vestige of the old usage in England, where dinner is sometimes used to refer to “lunch”–and the night-time meal that Americans call dinner is still sometimes called… supper.

Sangre (Spanish for “blood”) comes from the Latin sanguis for the same.

From that root, we also get…. sangria. Yes, the classic alcoholic wine plus fruit drink looks a bit like blood!

We also get a bunch of less common words, such as, consanguine (cousin marriages!) and even just sanguine, which originally meant “bloodthirsty”. It’s only a small step from the intensity of bloodthirsty to the cheery optimism of sanguine!

The Spanish for “car”, coche, on the surface sounds nothing like the English for the same — or any similar word.

But etymologically, it comes from the same root as the English, coach. Think of it in the old-fashioned sense: the coach class on a train!

All come from the same root: the Hungarian kocsi (Hungarian is unrelated to English or Spanish, so there is no deeper root), named after the village where the first coach, in the very old sense — a large carriage — was created.

It’s interesting how coach has been downgraded as a word in English: it was first the luxurious way to travel, and now it is the economy class of a train.

Tripulación (Spanish for “crew”, such as on a boat or plane) comes from the Latin prefix inter– (“between”) and the Latin root polire (“to polish” in Latin). A crew probably spends much of their time polishing the ship to perfection, right?

From the same Latin root polire, we get another Spanish word: pulir which means… “to polish”. Surprise, surprise!

From this root, we also get the English polish as well, in addition to the less obvious: interpolate. How did that transformation of meaning happen? Remember that in interpolating, you’re really polishing up the data! You’re taking data from the dusty bins of forgotten files, dusting it off, and reusing it: just like polishing up a ship.

The p-l root is clear in all variations as well.

Hueso (Spanish for “bone”) comes from the Latin for the same, os. The connection is particularly easy to see when we remember that the H- is perfectly silent in Spanish.

From the same root we get the English ossify — literally, to turn into bone! — but, considering about 4 people know this word, it is easy to remember hueso if we connect it to another word it is related to, albeit more distantly: oyster.

Oyster comes from the Latin for the same, Ostreum, which itself comes from the Latin word os, “bone.” What is an oyster defined by, if not, its hard, bony shell?

The o-s root is clearly visible in all variations!