Studying and examinations

The twelfth entry is a bolsa de estudos, and the first noun is a word an English reader already owns without recognising it. A bolsa is a bag or a purse, from the Latin bursa, which Rome had taken from the Greek byrsa, a hide — the leather the purse was cut from. That same bursa reached English by the learned road and settled inside the university, where the officer who keeps the accounts is the bursar and the award he pays out is a bursary. It went on working outside the gates as well: to disburse is to pay out of the purse, to reimburse is to put the money back into it, and « purse » itself is the same noun worn down by ordinary use. So A bolsa de estudos cobre o alojamento is not an image that Portuguese invented for the occasion; it is the plainest possible name for the thing. It is « scholarship » that is the odd one out, since it names the studying and says nothing about where the money sits.