Volcanology

The third entry is le cratère, and the word was a piece of tableware long before it was a hole in a mountain. Greek kratēr was the wide bowl in which wine was mixed with water before it was served, and the name comes from the verb kerannynai, to mix, not from the shape. Latin took it over as crater, and Latin writers were already using it for the bowl-shaped mouth of Etna, which is the step that carried the word into geology. Here the two languages part company. English keeps the vessel and the hole apart by spelling: a museum label says « krater », with a k, for the painted pot, and « crater » for the hollow left by a volcano, a bomb or a meteorite. French has one word for both, so un cratère à figures rouges sits in a glass case while le cratère sommital smokes at the top of the mountain. The sentence around the noun does the sorting that English leaves to a single letter: where it mentions a potter, a painter or a banquet, it is the bowl; where it mentions ash, gas or a collapse, it is the volcano.