• mage •
Pronunciation: mayj • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: A sorcerer, magician, enchanter.
Notes: The Oxford Dictionary lists this word as "archaic and literary", so we might bump into it in literary works and scholarship. It has one close relative, mageship, and a few distant cousins, like magic. The rarity of its use has blocked further progeny.
In Play: A mage is a powerful person who can solve problems as if by magic: "Gregory is like a mage with a bagful of magic spells to solve all the problems of this company." There are good and bad mages, usually denoted by the colors "white" and "black" (unfortunately): "Our president is a black mage who is determined to destroy all who oppose his ideas."
Word History: Today's Good Word is an Anglicization of magus (plural magi), referring to a member of a priestly caste among the Medes and Persians. According to the New Testament, three of them came with gifts at the birth of Jesus Christ. The word goes back to Greek magos "wise man", a word the Greeks borrowed from Old Persian magus "high priest, magician". Old Persian came by its word from PIE magh- "to be able, have power", seen in Sanskrit maghavat "strong", Old English mæg "I can" (today may), Dutch and German mag "I can, may", Danish måtte "can may", Russian mogu "I can, may". The PIE word is also the source of the nouns might in English and its equivalents, German Macht, Serbian moć, and Norwegian makt. (Now a note of double thanks to Luciano Eduardo de Oliveira, a long-standing member of the Good Word editorial board, who recommended we run today's magical Good Word.)
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