Making paper

The seventeenth entry is la disinchiostrazione, a long word with a short one buried inside it, and the short one is ours. Strip off the prefix and the ending and what is left is l’inchiostro, the Italian for ink — and « ink » is that same word. Both descend from Late Latin encaustum, which is the Greek enkauston, the purple fluid kept for an emperor’s signature, and the Greek is built on a verb meaning to burn in. English received it through Old French enque, ground it down to one syllable and lost the picture inside it; Italian kept three syllables and an inner ch, pronounced like a k, which is still the c of encaustum. That the root really is the burning one can be checked in another English word: « encaustic », the technique of painting with heated wax. So a reader meeting disinchiostrazione on a mill drawing is not meeting a new word at all. It is « de-inking », element for element, and the middle element has been at work in English for some eight hundred years.