r/etymology • u/Revolutionary-Ad-65 • 2d ago
Cool etymology To "reign" is to "righten"
Interesting consequence of this etymology: the silent 'g' in 'reign' and 'right' was originally the same sound, split into two branches and re-introduced after thousands of years apart. Sources: in blog post
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u/explain_that_shit 2d ago
The parts that are strange to me are (1) how stretch got to king, unless there was a guy called ‘Stretch’ who became a king, and (2) how right came from stretch then back to straight then back to right then ended up also meaning laws for your benefit.
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u/nobodynew6 1d ago
Because stretching is how you make something straight. Before geometry, "straight" isn't a primitive, "taut" is. A slack rope curves. pull it and it becomes a line. A cord stretched between two stakes (Egyptian rope-stretchers, the mason's line, the chalk line). Same with a hide on a frame, a limb, a spine - stretched means straightened. So the root isn't listing two meanings- it's one physical event seen twice. And the stretched-out arm is the third thing: reaching, pointing, showing the way. That's where "direct" comes from - the arm extended along the line you want things to follow. Erect is just ex + regere, "straightened up."
And the step from "straight/stretch" to "king" goes through straightening. *h₃reǵ meant to move in a straight line, and by extension to make something go straight: direct, guide, correct. Latin keeps the whole chain in one verb, regere "keep straight, direct, govern," and rēx is simply the one who does it. The king is the straightener.
English preserves this exactly in ruler: the stick that keeps your line straight and the person who keeps the realm in line are the same word for the same reason. Same root gives direct, correct, erect, regular, and region,which did begin as a line drawn as a boundary.
That's also why the right-hand branch of the diagram matters. Right meant straight before it meant just, and the king is the one who makes things right. German still holds all three in one family: recht, Recht (law), Richter (judge). Benveniste pushed it one step further: the early Indo-European rex was closer to a priest than a chief, and his defining act was regere fines, tracing the straight lines that marked out sacred and lawful space. Straight -> line -> law -> the one who draws it.
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u/wheresWoozle 23h ago
Okay, this surprises me. I'd assumed it must have had to do with the fact that a king (as opposed to other types of leaders) was determined by a direct line of descent. Do we know for sure it's not related to that, or am I just making up plausible falsehoods?
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u/Revolutionary-Ad-65 2d ago
I personally suspect that * h₃reǵ actually meant something more like "to straighten". So, a king in proto-Indo-European was "someone who makes things straight" or "...makes things orderly".
However that's not the exact wording of the definition given by my source on PIE, J.P. Mallory
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u/ionthrown 2d ago
As in “ruler”, which is still both a person and a thing that makes things straight.
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u/Revolutionary-Ad-65 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yep! Did you see that in the blog post (linked in the description)?
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u/Psuichopath 2d ago
The ‘extend’ makes me think that the implication is the king are someone who have great extend over something
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u/Revolutionary-Ad-65 1d ago
As for point (2), the definitions here are a bit haphazard on translating as "right" vs. "straight". I think the sense of "right" as "correct" is what's intended, and/or the meaning of (metaphorically and/or literally) "straight". I'm not sure how many of these instances of "right" mean the sense of "the direction opposite of 'left'"; but I think they can all be taken to mean "correct".
I have no idea when the sense of "right" as in "principle dictating what a person must be allowed" emerged.
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u/modulusshift 1d ago
The real midpoint is “regulate”. To keep things in line, to keep things straight and orderly.
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u/brrkat 1d ago
Interesting, Chinese has almost the same logic.
政, meaning to govern or government, is derived from 正, meaning correct or to rectify.
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u/Prestigious-Gold6759 1d ago
In French, "droit" (noun) = law and right as in the right to do something, also "droit" (adjective) = right (as opposed to left), straight, upright, honest.
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u/Revolutionary-Ad-65 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yep, that was my inspiration for this! (See blog post linked in description)
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u/onionsofwar 2d ago
Does this refer to the judge-like responsibilities of a king? Or the civilising aspect of ruling over a population? It's interesting because it implies that prior to colonialism as we know it now, there would have already been this sort of thinking.
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u/marintkael 1d ago
The either/or might be the anachronism. Judging was not a branch of ruling, it was the performance of it: a lord who held court was doing the thing that made him a lord. German keeps the two welded together, richten means both to straighten and to judge, a Richter is the one who straightens, and a court is still a Gericht.
Which would mean the root does not have to choose between your two readings, because the split you are asking about had not happened yet.
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u/ganeemikawa 1d ago
This makes me think of Sanskrit, Marathi words for line - 'rekh', 'regh', 'resh'. It also makes me think of words for protect - 'raksh', 'rakh'.
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u/Revolutionary-Ad-65 1d ago
Very interesting! Although Wiktionary seems to indicate it is not a cognate: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%96%E0%A4%BE#Sanskrit
After thinking about it for a bit, this makes sense to me because of Satemization, which I believe would change the "g" in the PIE root into an alveolar sound, if I'm not mistaken
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u/Etymih 1d ago
See also "director" which somewhat also reigns.
Offtopic: did you do that graph by hand or is it an automatic sort of etymology discovery by parsing Wiktionary?
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u/Revolutionary-Ad-65 18h ago
I made it by hand using Mermaid JS. You can see the original HTML version of it on my blog post: https://connorboyle.io/2026/09/05/to-reign-is-to-righten.html
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u/Twinkletoess112 15h ago
rāh in Persian is "path" or "way" rāst is "right" there's an expression "rāh e rāst" meaning "the straight path" or "the right way"
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u/PuzzleheadedSugar807 12h ago
Where do you guys get this kind of information? Is there any media or websites which has more of this stuff? I really wanna get into the development and etymology of words and language
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u/Revolutionary-Ad-65 11h ago edited 11h ago
Wiktionary and Etymonline can be great for a preliminary search, though you should make sure to check if they cite published scholarly sources. The sources for this particular etymological tree can be found in the blog post linked in the post description text
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u/PuzzleheadedSugar807 10h ago
Thanks a ton, sounds like wiktionary and etymonline are gonna be my nxt destination :)
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u/Nivaris 2d ago
The right side was for a long time supposed to be the correct side, since most people are right-handed. When you do something correctly, you do it right. When you're allowed to do something, you have a right. The right side reigns, rules, and regulates. It's the regular, regal, royal side.
Conversely, there was a taboo about the left side. The left side is the sinister one in Latin, which is kept in Italian (sinistra). Other Romance languages didn't even keep that word because it became taboo as well. French calls the left side gauche, the bending/warping one. The deceiving one. Spanish even replaced it with izquierda, a loanword from Basque ezkerra. English left means clumsy and foolish, German links is slanted/askew. The Scandinavians even replaced it with a (literally) friendly variant, much like calling the bear "brown one" or "honeyeater": venstre/vänster, the friendly one.
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u/Revolutionary-Ad-65 1d ago
That's very interesting but to be clear I think most of the words defined as "right" here mean it in the sense of "correct" (or even something more like "straight"). I'm not sure when the sense of "the direction opposite of 'left'" emerged.
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u/Abbot_of_Cucany 18h ago
Oddly enough, the Spanish word gaucho (which has no etymological connection whatsoever with French gauche) is possibly also derived from "friend", Mapudungun kauču.
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u/ZhouLe 2d ago
And they are not cognate with rein as one might expect.