I was always taught by my teachers to never run in the corridors, but little did they know that they were etymologically incorrect. The word was borrowed in 1591 from French, and that was taken in the fifteenth century from Italian corridore, which primarily referred to a long passageway between separate buildings but more literally meant "runner", just like how in English we sometimes use the word runner to describe long things like vines and carpets. Corridore comes from the Latin verb correre, which meant "to run". That, through the Proto-Italic reconstruction korzo, traces to the Proto-Indo-European root kers, also "to run". This means that corridor is related to words like cargo, caricature, chariot, currency, discharge, excursion, intercourse, miscarry, precursor, and many other words that kers forms all or part of.
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy philosophy, trivia, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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