In the neighborhood where I live a convent recently went on the market.

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This made the news because for years a significant piece of real-estate fairly close to downtown had been hidden behind high walls as the nuns who lived there kept their quiet ways.

Now, evidently there aren’t enough nuns left to make it worthwhile holding onto and the real-estate prices would likely make a welcome addition to church coffers.

The city is trying to designate the convent building itself as a heritage structure but the surrounding acreage will likely become stores, houses and condos.

So that all made me think of the word nun.

So many of the oldest Old English words show up in church documents that it isn’t much surprise that the word nun is among them.

The reason that so many words seem to trace back to church origins is that it was in the churches that literacy was taught and valued. Another reason might be the fact that documents likely to have survived the thousand-years-plus since Old English, needed a place to stay for all those years and churches were sometimes safer than other places.

Thus we find that nun was an Old English word.

But nun is also a word that has a Latin etymology. This is a bit confusing since most English words with Latin backgrounds have them because they arrived with French and the Norman Conquest and as such should rightfully be Middle English words, not Old English.

But since the church was filled with Latin nun was one of a smaller number of Latin based words that sneaked into English while it was still Old English, before the French had such a big influence on Middle English.

As far back as 1600 years ago in Latin the word nonna had been the female equivalent of nonnus which had meant “monk.”

Before that these two words are found to have had referred to a “wet-nurse” and a “foster father” respectively.  In some languages related words mean “grandmother” and “grandfather.”

The thinking is that the root word was one like momma that a young child might use. But in this case the word was used to refer to a respected person not related to you as mother or father.

Thus the deepest meaning of nun is directly analogous to the title of the chief nun at a convent, the mother superior; or similarly evolved in the same way that a priest is called father.