We use cylinders to get around which is etymologically appropriate.

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In London the subway is called the tube. A cylinder is a tube but when I say “we use cylinders to get around” I’m thinking of internal combustion engines in which the explosion of gas in the cylinders of the engine is what drives the car.

I went looking for a quote about cylinders the one that came to hand was by James Watt.

James Watt was an important contributor to the industrial age in that he made significant improvements to steam engines which of course were the precursor to the cars and trucks and trains we use today. Every time we decide that a room needs a 100 watt bulb or a 60 watt bulb—or their energy efficient equivalents—we are honoring James Watt.

So trains and cars and subways all involve cylinders and are ways to get around, but how does that relate etymologically?

To start with the reason a cylinder is called a cylinder is because it is round.

The renaissance adoption of many Latin words into English included cylindrus in 1570 which in turn had come from a Greek word kylindros.

Back in Ancient Roman or Greek times there were no steam or internal combustion engines and what those Latin and Greek speakers were referring to was a cylinder that could be used instead to move things around by acting as a roller underneath it. In this the Greek word came from kylindein meaning “to roll.”

The rolling roundness of these words can also be seen in cycle and circle and according to John Ayto’s Word Origins traces all the way back to an Indo-European root qwel meaning “to move around.”

So that’s why in our transport-intensive society the cylinders we depend on are appropriately named.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots renders that qwel as kwel but also makes the connection to a meaning of “to dwell” as in “hang around.”

They go further and include the Latin word for “cultivate” colere.

This makes me wonder whether the sense development was because the farmers were moving the earth around, or whether in a time when people were making the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers the “around” meaning had to do with settling down to a single place instead of moving around more broadly.