Urbandictionary says that the valedictorian is “the smartest, loneliest person in a graduating class.”

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I think that says a lot.

We all question our worth from time to time.  The smartest kid in the class may feel self critical about social issues; the party kids might not feel quite up to snuff in terms of getting grades.  Self examination is a little painful, but it’s normal and it’s those people who never ever do it that have a real problem.

The problem though, is for the rest of us, because those people never figure it out.

Anyway, the reason I came to the word valedictorian today puts the lie to a valedictorian being the loneliest kid in the class.

Brett, the listener who suggested the word, said it came to him in a story about a school that had a dozen valedictorians; hardly lonely.

It perked up his ears because he’d sort of assumed the very word valedictorian encapsulated a meaning of a “single individual.” He knew before he contacted me that it didn’t, but now I can tell you what it does encapsulate.

It is a Latin based word.  It came into English directly from Latin but didn’t reach the form that refers to the lonely or non-lonely person until it had crossed the big pond and was applied in academic circumstances as we recognize it now.

The earliest form in English was valediction from 1614, so Shakespeare would have still been alive.

At that time some Latin educated folks must have pulled the word from their ivory tower world and tried to apply it to their English speaking and writing to add a little class.

A valediction both in English and back in Latin meant a “farewell speech.”

The diction part obviously relates to speech. Vale was another Latin word that meant “be well.”

So from the first it was an ivory tower word. But it didn’t much get into plain everyday English.

Then in 1847 it reappeared as valedictorian in Webster’s American dictionary of the English language.

Noah Webster was dead four or five years by this time and it was his son-in-law Chauncey Goodrich who edited the expanded version of the dictionary.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives Webster’s as the first citation, although this OED entry hasn’t been updated for quite a while and Merriam Webster’s itself gives a date of 1759, although it does not cite sources.

In any case, this is a word that has always been a bit formal and academic and for that reason, when it did catch on in North America to be pulled out and reused each year at graduation time, its narrowness of utility meant that it didn’t catch on back in England.