Environment and energy

The twenty-first entry is il compostaggio, and the word under it reached English twice, four centuries apart, with a different job waiting each time. Behind it stands Latin compositum, a thing put together, which came into old French as composte and there named a dish of fruit stewed with sugar and spice. English took that in the fourteenth century, spelled it « compost », and used it for the mixture on the plate. By the sixteenth century gardeners had carried the same idea of a mixture over to the rotted heap dug into a bed, and the word walked out of the kitchen and never came back. When the pudding needed a name again, the language simply fetched the French word a second time, in its newer spelling, and got « compote ». So two English words that share no part of life share every letter of an ancestor, separated by four hundred years and one vowel. Italian has that Latin verb at home, in comporre and il composto, and keeps la composta for the stewed fruit — which is why il compostaggio had to be built on a borrowing, il compost, by a language that owned the root the whole time.