According to the OED this word only came into English about 600 years ago, yet its ancestor words in other languages appear to have been around just about as long as we can trace language back.

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I have called the Blegburn Dickshonary an obscure dictionary and by that I mean it isn’t one that excites much notice in the world; when I look out my window a tree obscures my view of the lovely garage opposite; and when I discussed the word camera I mentioned its early use as camera obscura where obscura meant “dark” in Latin.

So the sense of the word obscure is consistently “out of sight” or “hidden.”

The OED, etymonline and the American Heritage Dictionary all point back to roots of the word in Indo European with a meaning of “to cover.”

This gave rise to a wonderful collection of descendant words including, in ancient Greek the word for “attire” or “dress,” that people used to cover their bodies.

How about the word sky? The sky covers us and the American Heritage Dictionary at least connects it to the same Indo-European root.

Most of the dictionaries agree that the word scum also comes from the same root.

Here’s one that I wasn’t expecting: a meerschaum pipe.  That’s the kind of pipe with a bowl made of a carved white stone, often carved into a face or some sculptured image.

With years of smoking, a meerschaum takes on a golden brown color as it slowly soaks in all the toxic tobacco juices and noxious fumes.

But the pipe is named from the stone which in turn is named for its resemblance to the foam on the sea—that’s what meerschaum means “sea foam.”  Not only is it white, but it is made up of little cavities that are sort of like the bubbles in sea foam.

It’s this porous nature that allows it to soak in that golden tobacco tone.

The connection is certainly obscure but this kind of pipe is indeed etymologically linked to obscure, our word of the day.  The schaum in meerschaum means sea foam and we can hear its connection to the word scum. Both represent a covering that obscures the water below.