Around the world and over the ages skills and trades have become more specialized. Language evolves and morphs, providing words to describe the people and things associated with these specialties. What follows is a very brief explanation of the origin of just a few words used in American English related to handling of the dead.
Morticians and Undertakers
In American English, the specialists who prepare dead bodies for burial or cremation are usually called either morticians or undertakers.
The word undertaker came into English around 1400 with the general meaning of “a contractor or projecter of any sort.” In the 1690s, the word took on its specialized meaning, dealing with burials and funerals. The specialized meaning emerged from “funeral-undertaker.”
The English word mortician is of fairly recent origin. It entered American English in 1895 at the meeting of the Funeral Directors’ Association of Kentucky which was held in Louisville. The association decided that:
“An undertaker will no longer be known as an ‘undertaker and embalmer.’ In the future he will be known as the ‘mortician.’”
The word was coined from mortuary and ician and was intended to be as prestigious as physician.
The noun mortuary had entered English in the early fourteenth century from the Anglo-French mortuarie which was a “gift to a parish priest from a deceased parishioner.” The Latin roots of mortuary are found in mortuus which is the past participle of morire meaning “to die.” By the middle of the nineteenth century, mortuary was being used to refer to “a place where bodies are kept temporarily.”
Coffins and Caskets
Bodies are often placed in coffins (a chest or box for a body, sometimes in the traditional wedge shape) or caskets (a rectangular burial container for a body). Some Americans explain that a coffin is a six-sided box, while a casket is a four-sided, rectangular container.
Coffin came into English in 1380 when it was borrowed from the Old French cofin which came from the Latin cophinus which was taken from the Greek kophinos (κόφινος). In the Linear B syllabic script for Mycenaean Greek the word is written as ko-pi-na.
When the English language adopted coffin, the word was used to mean “box” and “chest” as well as “basket”. It also came to be used in referring to a pie dish and the hollow space under a horse’s hoof. Sometime in the 1500s, coffin came to be used to describe a wooden burial box used for the dead. Today, this is the primary use of the word.
The origins of casket are found in French. From the 1400s through the 1700s it referred to a small, ornamented box for jewels. In the mid-1800s, the Americans tweaked the word a bit and undertakers began to use casket instead of coffin. The word casket appears to have more elegance—i.e., the body is placed into an ornamented box for jewels, therefore the body is a valuable object.
Hearse
Bodies are often transported in a specialized vehicle known as a hearse.
Going back in time, the origin of hearse seems to have been hirpus, an Oscan (ancient Italic language), word which meant wolf. The journey from a word meaning “wolf” to one referring to “a vehicle for transporting dead bodies” is an interesting one.
One of the features of the wolf that seems to impress people is their teeth. When the Romans rose to power and began to unify what would become Italy, hirpus became hirpex meaning “a large rake.” The large teeth on the rake used to break up the soil reminded the Romans of a wolf’s teeth. Next, the hirpex became *herrpica in Vulgar Latin. At this time, the large rakes used for breaking up the soil were triangular in shape with teeth pointing down. Old French turned the word into herse and used it to refer to the triangular frame which held candles which was placed over a coffin in a church during funeral services.
A great many English words have their origins in Old French, and so the Old French herse became the English hearse. Over time, the word described a canopy which was placed over a coffin. In the mid-seventeenth century, the word began to be used to describe a funeral carriage.
The original hearse body shown below was made about 1905 and used as a horse-drawn unit. It is hand-carved wood. The 1925 Chevrolet chassis was shipped to Madrid, Spain, where the hearse body was mounted on it. This hearse was on display in the Pacific Northwest Truck Museum in Brooks, Oregon.
Cremation
In the United States today, most dead bodies are cremated rather than buried. The cremation rate in the United States has increased from nearly 4% in 1960 to 59% today and this increase has fostered the illusion that cremation is a fairly recent way of disposing of dead bodies. However, in Europe, cremation was common from 1200 BCE and by 1100 BCE, it was dominant in many areas.
With regard to etymology, cremation first appears in English in the 1620s and is from the Latin cremationen, a noun based on the past participle of the verb cremare meaning “to burn, consume by fire.” Going back to Proto-Indo-European, cremation is probably from the stem *ker- meaning “fire, heat.”
In the 1880s, the noun crematorium came into English with the meaning “an establishment for burning the bodies of the dead.” As with cremation, crematorium is based on the Latin verb cremare.
While there has been religious opposition to cremation in the United States based on the belief of some Christians that only buried bodies can be resurrected, this does not appear to be based on the Bible. Since 1993 the Catholic Church has allowed cremation.
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