Friday Morning Etymology Lesson: holy

I’ll spare you the long and twisty history of how we got the word holy in modern English, involving things like proto-indo-european linguistics, but it begins waaaaay back in prehistory with a root word: sol- which means, “whole”.  You will recognize this root word from many modern words, like solar and solitary, which might sound different from each other, but they have one thing in common and that thing is ONE, a whole, a single entity.  The root sol- informed many words related to wholeness, health, soundness, etc.  So in its most basic form, holy relates to health. It makes sense that holy came to mean something sacred, since in ancient times, health was generally thought to be a gift from the divine, and healers were believed to be connected to the divine.