Ichneutymon #1: hibernate

January 21, 2025 - 3 minutes read - 453 words

“I just want to go back to bed and hibernate for the rest of the year”

Welcome to the first Ichneutymon post! I’d ideally like to do this roughly weekly, and I hope it will be fun but also informative for y’all. Since winter is kicking off in the northern hemisphere, well, I thought hibernate would be a fitting word to inaugurate this feature. Just like in the example sentence above, I love sleeping in and sometimes I envy bears and their ability to hibernate for ages at a time. At the same time, I really love doing things when I’m not sleeping, so it’s probably good I’m a human!

Let’s drill right down to the Latin etymology of the word: hibernare, “to pass the winter, to winter.” This verb itself is related to the adjective hibernus, -a, -um, “wintry, of winter.” Other related words include hiems, “winter,” the typical noun used, but there is also a substantive use of hibernus in the neuter, hibernum, meaning “winter” (lit. “a wintry thing,” or perhaps with a supplied tempus = “the winter time”). And where people, especially the Roman army, “hibernated,” were in hiberna, “winter-quarters” (with a supplied castra = “the winter camp”).

Other related Latin words include hibernalis, -e, adj., “wintry, of winter”; hibernaculum, “winter residence, winter apartment; (pl.) tents for winter-quarters, winter tents.” This latter one is particularly interesting, as Arthur C. Clarke in 2001: a space odyssey refers, IIRC, to the chambers in which most of Discovery’s crew slept during the long voyage as “hibernacula.” I’ll need to remember, too, to write up and post my list of “winter words” that I previously made for my Latin and Greek students when I was a teacher; those were fun!

Keep in mind that Hibernia, an old name for Ireland, is not from hibernus (i.e., “the wintry land”), but the Greek name for the island, Ἰουερνἰα (Iouernia). Per Wiktionary, however, the initial h was likely influenced by hibernus.

Let’s look a little further back, though. Lat. hibernus is related to Greek χειμερινός (kheimerinos), “of or in winter,” an adjectival form related to χειμῶν (kheimon), “winter” and also χεῖμα (kheima), “winter weather, cold, frost; winter.” χεῖμα seems to me the closest thing to Lat. hiems, but hibernus in Lewis & Short (L&S) also references χιών (khion), “snow” as etymologically connected to hiems. There are a ton of winter words in both Latin and Greek, and this is barely scratching the surface! I don’t want to go on too deep a dive as I could go on for ages with this stuff, so you get the idea.

Thanks for reading, and please let me know through whatever means is easiest if you have a suggested word!