Fun fact: urination isn't even the proper scientific/formal term for peeing; it's micturate. That being established, urination is clearly the act of producing urine, a word that was borrowed into Middle English from the Old French word urine, alternatively orine. This in turn derives from the Latin term urina, which still had the same meaning, which is reconstructed as deriving from the Proto-Indo-European zero-grade uhr, meaning "liquid" but mainly carrying connotations of water or milk. That same root, uhr, later became the Latin word umere, an infinitive meaning "to be moist", but, like humble pie, a phrase we've already examined, it added an h because of shifting pronunciational giving us the verb humere, which could be conjugated to yield humidus. From the modern-day similarities and the title of this post, you can probably guess what's coming next: (through French humid) this gave us our word humid, still meaning "moist" and now proven to share a root with the word urine through a hypothetical ancient root meaning "milk". Etymology is amazing!
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. I have a linguistics degree from Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote my thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy traveling, trivia, philosophy, board games, conlanging, and art history.
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