I came to today’s word from the episode I did on the word matrix.

As I said there matrix traces back to a much older word mater meaning “mother.”

But I see in the Oxford English Dictionary the ending of matrix is a standard Latin suffix strapped onto a number of words to indicate that the person involved is a female.

Not that I’ve ever met any but dominatrix is a female role that springs to mind.

The OED says there in its matrix entry that the trix suffix may have been added to matrix in Latin after nutrix.

That pricked up my ears, what’s nutrix?

I mentioned that the American Heritage Dictionary has a reputation for being a little more daring in the reach of it’s etymologies than some other dictionaries but in the case of nutrition the recently updated OED is right onside.

Back in Indo-European and then in Sanskrit there was a word snu that meant to flow. If you’ve ever been or been close to a new mother when she hears babies crying you’ll believe it when I make the connection between flow and nutrition. Just the sound of babies crying is usually enough to get a nursing mother’s milk flowing.

So by the time the word snu made it up to Latin it had morphed and lost its leading S.

Within Latin the word began to split and eventually gave us both nourish and nurse. So a nutrix is a woman who provides care and nurturing to growing children, back in Latin she was a “wet nurse.”

Nutrition first showed up in English almost 600 years ago through French. Nutrix appeared just slightly later.

Although nutrix isn’t a word that I at first recognized and so I think I’m safe in saying isn’t a word too commonly used, the OED shows a citation for it as recently as 1995 so I guess it’s still in circulation.

The document that first brought us nutrix is of some interest. A guy named Ranulf Higdon used it back in the 1300s in his book Polychronicon which was a history of England as seen from the middle ages.

But Higdon wrote it in Latin so that doesn’t count as an English word.

Others came after Higdon and liked what he’d done and so translated it into English; that’s where nutrix was legitimized as an English word.

Then in 1857 the government of England undertook a fairly gargantuan project. This became known as the Rolls Series.

The head judge of the land had as part of his responsibility the keeping of all of the public records of England. Because early on these had been scrolls his title was Master of the Rolls.

150 years ago the Master of the Rolls realized that all the medieval records of the history of England were in a pretty sorry state. He convinced the government to cough up money so that hundreds of these old documents could be carefully studied, translated and reprinted. Thus what had previously been in hand written manuscript format was reproduced in typeset format.

If the Master of the Rolls hadn’t come through for us back then Google Book Search could never have digitized the hand written versions. But he did, and they did, so now you can see them from the comfort of your desk.