Etymology Lesson: window

This morning I was doing my Duolingo Norwegian course and it gave me a new word, as it sometimes does, as sort of an invitation to see if I can guess what the word is.  Today’s word was vindu, which means, “window.”  As I discussed in my post on the etymology of defenestrate, many other languages use some form of fenestra as their word for window.  But this Norwegian word, vindu, sounds enough like window, that it inspired me to look up the etymology to confirm that the word is indeed of Old Norse origin.

It is indeed, and the etymology is pretty cool. It comes from two words vindr, meaning “wind,” and auga, meaning, “eye,” combined into the Old Norse word vindauga, or “wind eye.”  The word auga can be traced back to the PIE root, oku-, which means, “to see,” and the root can be found in lots of words that relate to seeing, like monocle, oculus, optic, and cyclops.  Wind also has a PIE root, we-, which means “to blow,” and can be found in words like weather, wing, vent, and Nirvana, which, by the way, does not literally mean “transcendence,” it means “disappearance,” like a fire blowing out.