• suspicious •
Pronunciation: sê-spi-shês • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: 1. Questionable, causing mistrust, arousing suspicion, shady, fishy, as 'suspicious behavior'. 2. Skeptical, mistrusting, distrustful, as 'suspicious of strangers'. 3. Reflecting or expressing mistrust, suspicion, as 'a suspicious look'.
Notes: Today's Word comes with a complete panoply of derivations, including an adverb, suspiciously, and the active noun is the rather unexpected suspicion. The noun suspiciousness is slightly different, meaning "inclination to suspect (the worst)". The verb, suspect, is different from the passive noun, suspect "someone suspected of wrong-doing", only by the placement of accent.
In Play: So long as suspicion does not devolve into paranoia, it's OK: "Jerry Attrick is very suspicious of anything new." Our lives are filled with suspicions: "His mother was a little suspicious of the very large turnout for Bennie's snare drum recital."
Word History: Today's Good Word was borrowed from Anglo-French suspecious, a variant of Old French sospecious (Modern French suspicieux), inherited from Latin suspiciosus "causing mistrust". The Latin word is made up of an assimilated form of sub "under" + spicere, a variant of specere "to look at". We still associate the idea of "under" with wrongdoing: underhanded, underground, 'under the table'. Well, the Romans did, too. They inherited sub, a reduced form of ex-upo "from under", from PIE. We find evidence of upo in English up and upon, German auf "on", and Greek hypo "under". Latin specere was created from PIE spek'-/spok- "to watch", evidence of which we see in Sanskrit spasati "sees", German Späher "scout", and Armenian spasem "I expect". Greek treated the PIE word with a suspicious type of metathesis which produced skep-/scop-, noticeable in skeptomai "to look", skeptikos "thoughtful", and skopein "to observe, examine", source of English -scope. (Lest we become suspicious, let's now thank Wordmaster David Myer for suggesting today's alluring Good Word.)
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