bespoke

Pronounced: bih-SPOKE, adj

Notes: When I first ran across this word, I didn’t know it, but now I know it

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Yesterday’s word

The word petard means

• a case containing an explosive to break down a door or gate or breach a wall
• a firework that explodes with a loud report

First usage

Our word came into English in the late 1500s

Background / Comments

I know the word from the strategy game “Age of Empires II”; in that game, a petard is a unit that carries explosives to be used against structures. Our word is also well-known from the phrase “hoist with one’s own petard” (meaning victimized or hurt by one’s own scheme). This phrase made me think of some kind of pulley arrangement raising something in which the person raising the thing gets caught in the mechanism. However, that is wrong; the phrase came from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (“For ’tis sport to have the enginer/ Hoist with his own petar”). Hamlet uses this phrase to refers to an engineer that sets an explosive device, and inadvertently blows himself up into the air. Our word came from the Middle French word peter (to break wind), which traced back to the Latin verb pēdere (to break wind).