furious

Latin had a wonderfully explosive word, furia, for rage and wild passion, and it spawned furiosus — basically “possessed by anger.” French carried that hot coal across the Channel, and by the late 1300s English was using furious for both temper and motion: a furious storm could be angry without having any feelings at all. The family keeps popping up in places you’d expect, like fury and furor, but also in Ariosto’s 1516 epic Orlando Furioso, where the title alone sounds like a man who has lost the fight with his own nerves. It’s a neat reminder that English loves importing intensity from Latin and then spreading it around like sparks. Say furious once and you can almost hear the Roman crowd, the French court, and a tempest all shouting at the same time.