peripheral
/pəˈrɪfərəl/adjective, noun
Located at the edge; not central or essential
From Greek, via Late Latin, Medieval Latin, and Old French periphery (Circumference).
Lineage
periphery
-al
The story
Picture an ancient Greek geometer tracing a circle in the sand: the line around it was peripheria, quite literally something “carried around.” Inside that word, peri meant “around,” while pherein meant “to carry”—the same Greek verb-family that gives us words like metaphor, something “carried across” from one idea to another. The term traveled through Latin and French before English speakers used it for the Earth’s surrounding atmosphere in the late 14th century; by the 1570s, it had acquired its geometric sense of a figure’s outer boundary. The adjective peripheral appeared in English by 1803, and by 1966 the noun could mean a computer’s auxiliary devices. A mouse or printer may sit outside the computer’s core, but its name still carries the old Greek image of a line being carried all the way around.
Modern usage
A vulgar Urban Dictionary entry uses “a peripheral” for an alleged exhibitionist gesture intended to be seen in someone’s peripheral vision.
- Heard in
- Urban Dictionary
- See
- Urban Dictionary entries for “peripheral”
Words from the same roots
periphery · Greek, via Late Latin, Medieval Latin, and Old French, ‘Circumference, outer surface, or boundary’
Derivedperimeter, periphrasis, periscope, peripatetic, peripeteia
-al · English suffix, ‘Of or relating to’
Derivedcentral, marginal, seasonal, structural
Sources
- Etymonlineperipheral, periphery, sycophant, shift, central, rim
- Urban Dictionaryperipheral
- Wikipediaperipheral
- Wiktionaryperipheral, periphery