Today’s episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording - The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English. Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com

I’ve recently become a member of the board of directors for an association of cottage owners.  I’ve been working on a strategy to help protect the natural environment around the lake.  So the word strategy is on my mind.

I’ll paraphrase here from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary:

strategy - the science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and military forces…to afford the maximum support to adopted policies [to protect the bunnies and ducks].

Okay, I put that last part in myself.

I don’t think I’ll be using military force in my strategy but the military does have a deep stake in the etymology of the word strategy.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary there was an Indo-European word root ster that meant “to spread things out.”

I came across this root once before in the podictionary episode on the word street which came about because the Romans built their roads in layers and they called the layers strata.  The strata were called strata because each material was “spread out” before the next one was piled on top.

Strategy didn’t come through Latin though, instead it came through Greek.

That same word root meaning “spread out” was applied to a big group of people who were spread out over an open space.

Sometimes an army was a big group of people spread out over an open space and so the Greek word for army was stratos.

An army needs a commander and the Greek word for a general was strategos.

Of course it’s the general who practices the “science and art of deploying political, economic, psychological, and military force” to achieve his purpose and so that art and science was named after him.  Since he was a strategos the art and science became a strategy.

One of the rules of language is that if you don’t have a word for it, you likely don’t think about it much.

From this little etymology you can plainly see that the ancients were pretty smart in planning out their military operations.  Yet English didn’t pick up the word strategy until 1688.

What does that say about England’s planning capacity?

I went looking for synonyms with a deeper history and believe it or not the word plan didn’t arrive until 1635.

But obviously the English did strategize before that and I did find an Old English word rede that seems to fit the bill.  It relates to a root meaning of “understand” and could also mean “advice,” “plan” or “scheme.”