crystalline
/ˈkrɪstəlaɪn/adjective
Made of, resembling, or structured like crystal
From Greek κρύσταλλος (Clear ice).
Lineage
κρύσταλλος
-ῐνος
The story
Ancient Greeks looked at clear quartz and imagined that it was ice frozen so solid that even the summer sun could not thaw it. They called it κρύσταλλος, from a word connected with frost and the hard crust formed by freezing—a chilly origin for something now associated with glittering jewelry and laboratory precision. Greek then added -ῐνος, an adjectival tag meaning “of or like,” producing κρυστάλλινος: literally, “crystal-ish.” The word passed through Latin and Old French before appearing in English as crystalline in the late 14th century, when writers used it for both transparent purity and crystal-like material. So whenever prose is called crystalline, it carries a tiny fossil of an ancient mistake: what looked like frozen water was actually stone.
Words from the same roots
κρύσταλλος · Ancient Greek, ‘Clear ice; crystal’
Derivedcrystal, crystallize, crystallinity, crystallomancy, quartz, transparent
Sources
- Etymonlinecrystalline, crystal, -ine, transparent, coumadin
- Urban Dictionarycrystalline
- Wiktionarycrystalline, crystal, -ine