Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31481772-20180304181730

I am glad to present the Word of the Week series together with Federico de Simone (Discussions user). Here, we will take the name of a Greek/Roman god and point out words in other languages that are related to it.

The god or goddess of this week is Hygieia. She is Asclepius' daughter and the goddess of health and cleanliness. As you can see, the English word "hygiene" comes from her name. In fact Spanish Higiene, Italian Igene and French hygiène come from the same word.

Now a bit of etymology. What many of you might not know is that "hygiene" comes from a root word "auw" or "ayu", which was in the ancestor language of many European and Asian languages. Its meaning is life, take our word for it. The English words "age" and "ever" come from the same source, and as you can see, they have similar meanings. In North Indian languages, we have "aayu" meaning "age", from which the word "Ayurveda" (for a medical practice) also comes from. Age, life, ever and Ayurveda, [NOT] incidentally, are related to treatment of illnesses and restoration of health.

Now we'd like you to try and find a word in some other language, which sounds like 'hygiene" or "age" or "aayu" and means something similar. What do you think about this Word of the Week series? 