This word came into English from Modern Latin in the late 19th century. The ancient Latin word is oscen, whose elements according to Etymonline are ob- and canere "to sing". These in turn have Proto-Indo-European origins, epi-, which has a broad prepositional meaning of spatial nearnessand kan-, "to sing".
Other words that seem to be from kan_ include accent, charm, descant, enchantment and Carmen, and many others.
Oscine is a rare word. I came across it in Times 2 Word watch column and I'd never seen it before. It only occurs on average 0.01 times per million words. So in this blog post it has come up with a frequency that would normally only appear once in every 200 million words.
A beautiful word
oscine : pertaining to songbirds
This word came into English from Modern Latin in the late 19th century. The ancient Latin word is oscen, whose elements according to Etymonline are ob- and canere "to sing". These in turn have Proto-Indo-European origins, epi-, which has a broad prepositional meaning of spatial nearness and kan-, "to sing".
Other words that seem to be from kan_ include accent, charm, descant, enchantment and Carmen, and many others.
Oscine is a rare word. I came across it in Times 2 Word watch column and I'd never seen it before. It only occurs on average 0.01 times per million words. So in this blog post it has come up with a frequency that would normally only appear once in every 200 million words.