Etymology Bites #1: Pollution

“Pollution” is a nice, easy word for translators. French to English translators anyway. It means the same thing in both languages; no hidden connotations (unless you’re into medieval literature); no tricky spelling differences; it often comes with a modifier (noise, air, etc.) to make it extra clear. All this makes the word's etymology all the more interesting.

Indeed, it wasn't until the 19th century that the word "pollution" came to be associated with humans' degradation of the natural world. Before the Industrial Revolution, "pollution" had purely religious and moral connotations to do with impurity and defilement.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word pollution originally comes from the 4^th-century Latin pollutio, which referred to defilement and spiritual or moral corruption. The word evolved into the Middle French pollucion or polucion, which was probably brought over the channel to Britain by the Normans. In 13^th century Britain, pollutio gained another meaning, “nocturnal emission” (which means... well, look it up), before evolving to pollutiun and eventually pollucion or pollution.

Pollution then had a fairly untroubled etymological journey until the late 19^th century; according to the OED, the first use of pollution in English to refer to “the contamination of a natural environment by waste” was in 1874. The attribution of this new meaning to a word that had always carried connotations of profanation may not be coincidental given the context of the Industrial Revolution, when a romantic, conservative, anti-progress movement was already well underway, and nature was increasingly being invested with moral value. This is ironic when you see how modern-day conservative Americans favour fossil fuels over green energy. But I digress.

According to the French National Centre for Textual and Lexical Resources (CNRTL), the first occurrence of the word with this meaning in French came in 1874, in a report on river pollution; France got its word back with a brand-new meaning in another example of “round-trip borrowing.”