An episode from 2006

Today we can predict the future with elaborate weather forecasting computer programs, and by getting Ivy League educated economists on the radio.

But in the bad old days people who wanted an accurate picture of the days to come would consult a soothsayer who poked through chicken entrails, or looked to the stars.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe but weather forecasters and economists are an improvement.

Because knowing the future is always helpful it is no surprise that people have been trying to make forecasts since a long long time ago.  This is why our word today, “horoscope” shows up pretty early in the history of English.  The first citation is in the year 1050, so that’s just 16 years before the Norman invasion that brought all those French words with their Latin roots into English.

So that makes it Old English.

But people who know Greek will instantly recognize the word’s suffix—scope—as coming from the Greek word for observe or watch.  That’s where we get names for things like telescope and microscope.  The prefix in the word horoscope is also from Greek.

Surprisingly, horo is still completely recognizable to modern English speakers because it means “hour” and the literal translation of “horoscope” is “hour watcher.”

In this case however, the hour watcher isn’t waiting for his shift to end, the figurative translation is “the observation of the hour of birth.”

So it’s the date and time when you’re born that is supposed to tell those astrological soothsayers what your future holds.

This makes “horoscope” a bit of an odd word.  Most words that can be traced back to Greek came into English after the Norman invasion and so depend on the fact that French was built on the common man’s Latin and Latin in turn took much inspiration from Greek.

To me this seems to reinforce the idea that knowing the future was always important, and important enough that people talked a lot about it so that a word from antiquity somehow was carried to the British isles and continued getting talked about even to this day.