Buying a used car

The eighteenth entry is o disco de travão, the brake disc, and the first noun has had a far busier life in English than in Portuguese, because it arrived four separate times. Behind all four is the Latin discus, taken from the Greek dískos, the flat plate an athlete threw. By late Latin the word also meant a platter, and that is the shape in which it reached us first: Old English disc is « a dish », which is still a thing with a flat round bottom. Set on legs, the platter became a table to write at, and medieval Latin desca gave « a desk ». Set on a platform at the end of a hall, it gave « the dais », by way of the Old French deis. Then the learned form was borrowed twice more, whole, as « disc » and as « discus ». Portuguese did none of that splitting. O disco is the brake disc, the record and the thrower’s discus at once, and the plate on the table has a name of its own, o prato.