Lewis Carol’s work Through the Looking Glass wasn’t called Through the Mirror and that made me wonder if mirror was a word that came along more recently.

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In fact mirror came into English 700 years ago from French where it was about 200 years older.

By the time it arrived in English mirror had already taken on an analogous meaning, since the first citation shows mirror to mean “an example worth imitating.” So with this meaning Mother Theresa would be a mirror.

It was only a few decades later that the meaning we’d recognize in our bathrooms appeared (although at the time glass wasn’t exactly common so mirrors were polished metal.)

The term looking glass didn’t appear until 1562 and that first citation runs “daily & hourly I might look, as in a mirror or looking-glass” which shows mirror as the standard word against which looking glass was being introduced.

All the dictionaries I looked at said that mirror came to English through French from a Latin word mirari meaning “to look at,” “to wonder over,” or “to admire.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots pushes the etymology back to smei, an Indo-European word that meant “to laugh” or “to smile.”

The sense development wasn’t that you smile in the mirror, but instead that something you would smile at might be something you would wonder over or admire.

Both the words smile and admire are thought also to be connected to this Indo-European root.

The sense of a mirror as something that represents the world around it is the reason why a number of newspapers have the word mirror in their names.