hydra

Pronounced: HI-druh, noun

Notes: I didn’t know the meaning, but I did know the etymology

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Yesterday’s word

The word raconteur is “a person who excels in telling anecdotes”

First usage

Our word came into English in the mid-1800s

Background / Comments

As I noted, I’ve run across our word in reading; for some reason, instead of meaning a good storyteller, I had the impression that it referred to a person who made a living by unconventional methods (not necessarily illegal, but sometimes borderline, perhaps). So I learned that there is nothing disreputable at all about our word. It came into English from French, and it came to French from the Old French word raconter (to tell). This word came from another Old French word aconter [alt: acompter] (to tell; to count), which came from the Latin word computare (to count). We get “computer”, “account”, and “count” from this Latin word.