Fun for Friday: Revolution Etymology
Image by Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay
The other day, I started thinking about verb and noun pairs like evolve and evolution, resolve and resolution, and revolve and revolution. But “revolt” also becomes “revolution” when turning it into a noun, despite it not having the “suffix-volve” construction of these other pairs. What gives?
This one might not really be quite as complex as it seems. Because while “revolve” initially meant “to rotate” in the sense of celestial bodies, it also has a meaning of turning, as in a wheel revolving. And in some ways, a revolution in the political sense is a turning of the tides, so to speak.
According to Online Etymology, “revolution” had the meanings of rotation or turning from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, but “The sense of ‘an instance of great change in affairs’ is recorded from mid-15c. The political meaning ‘overthrow of an established political or social system’ is recorded by c. 1600, from French, and it was especially applied in England to the expulsion of the Stuart dynasty under James II in 1688 and transfer of sovereignty to William and Mary under a purer constitutional government.”
That being said, “revolt” does actually come from a different root word, meaning “overthrow” or “overturn.” But it’s easy to see how turning and overturning aren’t all that far apart, and someone also probably decided “revoltution” was a weird word and hard to say.
There’s also apparently a slight difference between a “revolt” and a “revolution” in terms of its success, which is not a distinction I’d really thought about prior to poking at this etymology. According to a comment on Reddit, a “revolt” is less organized, more like a riot,” while a “revolution” succeeds at its aims. So that’s an interesting distinction to make if you’re using these words to describe an event in fiction or non-fiction!
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