Winston Churchill is seen from this point as a giant of not too distant history.

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He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom* during the Second World War but like any politician there were times when things were not all going his way, as was the case in 1936 when he was an outsider,  and critical of the British government, saying that they were “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift.”

If someone is adamant about something they are decided, they are resolute, they are unyielding.

With this kind of meaning to the word adamant it makes perfect sense that the etymology of adamant comes from a Greek root literally meaning “not tame” and figuratively meaning “invincible.”

But the word’s history has taken a few unlikely twists and turns in getting to how we use it today.

Although the word was in use in roughly the same form back in classical Greek and Latin, the meaning we give to the word doesn’t seem to have emerged until about 100 years ago.

The word was old enough and popular enough that its first citation with any meaning at all as an English word, was back in the year 888, so that’s Old English.

The context back then, and the shifts in meaning over time, mean that we really don’t know what the writers of more than 1100 years ago meant when they used the term adamant.

By about 600 years ago there were clearly two meanings that can be identified; neither of which I was expecting.  In both cases the word adamant referred to a special kind of rock.

Medieval scholars read this word adamant in those older documents and tried to figure out what exactly the authors were trying to get at. But they made an error in their etymology.  Instead of the Greek root meaning “not tame” they guessed at the Latin root adamare meaning “to take a liking to” or “to have an attraction for.”

They asked themselves,why might a rock be named with a word that meant “to have an attraction for.” Maybe it’s because that rock attracted other rocks.

Rocks with lots of iron in them can take on the properties of a magnet. And so those misinformed medieval scholars began to call these rocks adamant.

Other medieval scholars guessed at the Greek “invincible” etymology that we think today is the correct one. According to this etymology adamant thus applied to extremely hard rocks and sometimes to the hardest metal.

You might not recognize it, but this usage actually stuck.

You don’t recognize it because it morphed a bit.  Like me, you probably never thought that the word adamant even applied to rocks. But I think you will recognize the particularly hard kind of rock that the word adamant’s descendant word applies to.

If I chip off the leading “a” from adamant doesn’t damant pretty easily approximate the name of the rock that Carol Channing and Marilyn Monroe claimed were a girl’s best friend?

Adamant became diamond.

* at first I just said “England,” but Hugh wrote to correct me; see comments.