compost

Pronunciation

• IPA: /ˈkɒm.pɒst/ (UK); /ˈkɑm.poʊst/ (US)^[1]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Old French composte (“mixture, compost”),^[2][3][4] from Latin compositum, compositus,^{[2][3][4][5][6]} past participle of compōnere “to put together”.^[2][3][4][5] It is related to composite and compote.^[3][6][4]

Earliest recorded meaning

Barnhart and Etymonline first record the word, as compote, in the late 14th century, for a mixture or preserve.^[3][4] The OED, however, has the fertilizer sense, a mixture for enriching land, as early as 1258.^[7]

Semantic evolution

Most sources date the fertilizer sense from the 1580s (1587 in Barnhart and Merriam-Webster).^[3][5][4] Etymonline notes that the French word in this sense is a 19th-century borrowing back from English,^[4] and that the cooking sense now belongs to compote, a later borrowing.^[4] The verb meant at first to treat land with compost (1388 in the OED);^[7][4] the sense of turning matter into compost is from 1829.^[7][4][5]

Timeline

• 1258 – a mixture for fertilizing land (OED).^[7]
• 1388 – verb, to manure land with compost.^[7]
• c. 1420 – a stew; a fruit preserve, now obsolete.^[7]
• 1587 – the fertilizer (Barnhart, Merriam-Webster).^[3][5]
• 1829 – verb, to make into compost.^[7][4][5]

Modern meaning

Noun

1. A mixture of decaying organic matter, such as leaves and manure, used to fertilize and improve soil.
2. A mixture or compound.

Verb

1. To turn plant matter or waste into compost.
2. To fertilize with compost.

Word family

• compostable
• composter

Related words

• compote
• composite
• compose
• component

References

1. [1] Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. [1] [2] [3] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1992), 3rd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin
3. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Barnhart, Robert K., ed. (1995), The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, New York: HarperCollins
4. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] Harper, Douglas, Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
5. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2003), 11th ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
6. [1] [2] Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1999), 2nd ed., New York: Random House
7. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press