It doesn't take much to start people arguing about words, but there's no quarrel about the origin of
logomachy. It comes from the Greek roots
logos, meaning "word" or "speech," and
machesthai, meaning "to fight," and it entered English in the mid-1500s. If you're a word enthusiast, you probably know that
logos is the root of many English words (
monologue,
neologism,
logic, and most words ending in
-logy, for example), but what about other derivatives of
machesthai?
Actually, this is a tough one even for word whizzes. Only a few very rare English words come from
machesthai. Here are two of them:
heresimach ("an active opponent of heresy and heretics") and
naumachia ("an ancient Roman spectacle representing a naval battle").
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