Etymology — The Origins of English Words

From colo- + -tomy.

From counter- + poison.

Coined in the early 1990s by a group of members of the Kerista Commune, a polyamorous group based in San Francisco, California, U.S.A., in existence between 1956 and 1991, apparently randomly using an alphabet board (similar to a Ouija board), with -ion (suffix forming nouns). The hypothesis that the word is derived from French compère (“partner”) + English -sion (a variant of -tion (suffix forming nouns)), based on an earlier use of French compérage by the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) to denote the practice of brothers-in-law sharing wives observed among Tupi people of the Brazilian Amazon, is less plausible: a website run by former members of the community states that neither the word compérage nor Lévi-Strauss’s work was known to them at the time, and the formation of the word in this way does not correspond to any known morphological process.

Attested since the 1920s. From cow + son

From corrupt + -o- + -cracy.

From Middle French corrival, from Latin corrīvālis.

From Middle French confuter, from Latin confūtō.

From cog (“to play tricks with dice”) + -er.

From corn + stalk.

From correlate + -ive or cor- + relative.

From Middle French collision, from Latin collīsiō (“clash, concussion, collision”) (whence -ion (noun suffix denoting action, result, process, state, condition)), from collīsus (“clashed together, conflicted, contended”), past participle of collīdō (“to clash, strike, dash, beat, or press together”) (whence collide), from con- (“together”) + laedō (“to strike, collide, hurt”) (whence col- (assimilated form of com-)).

* (Jewish): Variant of Cohen. * (given name): As a modern given name, also a variant of Koen.

From Middle English curteisly, curteisliche; equivalent to courteous + -ly.

From Latin comminūtus (“crumbled, lessened”).

From counter- + work.

From corn + husk.

Uncertain, but compare Danish kusse (“vagina”), Persian کس (kos, “vagina”), vernacular Arabic كُس (kus, “vagina”), and Northern Kurdish qûz (“vagina”). The term may have been introduced to the United States after the Second World War by servicemen who fought in north Africa, but it already existed as a slang term in the blues community as early as 1929.

From Middle English cors, from Old French cors, from Latin corpus (“body”). Doublet of corpus and corpse, and distantly of riff. Compare corset.

From Middle English consonance, from Middle French consonance, from Latin cōnsonantia. Doublet of consonancy. By surface analysis, con- + son- + -ance.

From Medieval Latin compāscuitās, from compāscuus + -itās.

From consolidate + -or.

From cow + poke.

From clergy + person.

From Middle English chaunteresse, from Old French chanteresse; equivalent to chanter + -ess.