Living and the household

The sixth entry is a cozinha, and an English reader has been saying it since before English was written down. Behind it stands Latin coquina, the room where cooking is done, built on coquere, to cook. Portuguese inherited it in the ordinary way, unbroken, and then built the rest of the household on top of it: cozinhar is to cook and o cozinheiro is the person who does it, both of them named after the room rather than the other way round. « Kitchen » is that same Latin word, and it arrived by a road almost nobody expects. It was taken into the West Germanic dialects while the Roman frontier still stood, centuries before the Normans, and came down to Old English as cycene — which is why it looks Germanic, sounds Germanic and is not. « Cook » travelled the same early road, from coquus. Much later English borrowed the word a third time through French, as « cuisine », and handed it the cooking instead of the room. Three arrivals, one Latin kitchen, and only Portuguese never had to borrow it at all.