φάκελος

Pronunciation

• 5th-century BC Attic: /pʰá.ke.los/^[1]
• 4th-century AD Koine: /ˈɸa.ce.los/^[1]
• 10th-century Byzantine: /ˈfa.ce.los/^[1]

Forms

φάκελος (phákelos) m (genitive φακέλου); second declension^[1]

Etymology

Beekes considers it Pre-Greek, because of the variant φάκελλος (phákellos) in Aristotle: such alternation of /l/ and /ll/ is a Pre-Greek feature, and the suffix is like that of πύελος (púelos) and σκόπελος (skópelos).^[2][3][1] The PHILOGLOSSA database rates this as highly reliable.^[4] Furnée compares φάσκωλος (pháskōlos, “leather bag”), and Solmsen, hesitantly, σφάκελος (sphákelos, “gangrene, spasm”), with a shared sense “drawn together”.^[2][1]

Chantraine holds the likeness with the word for gangrene to be chance, but asks whether φάκελος and σφάκελος (sphákelos, “middle finger”), a homonym of that word, are variants of one word, with the same wavering initial as φαλάγγιον (phalángion) beside Modern Greek σφαλάγγι (sfalángi).^[5][6] He and Babiniotis also allow a link with Latin fascis (“bundle”), which de Vaan rejects.^[5][6][1] Albanian bashkë (“together”) has also been compared.^[1]

Earliest recorded meaning

Herodotus has bundles of brushwood and of rods, and Thucydides and Euripides bundles of firewood.^[7][8][9]

Semantic evolution

In Classical Greek it was a bundle of sticks, mostly firewood.^[7][8] Dio Cassius used it for the Roman fasces, the bundles of rods of the magistrates.^[7] Aristotle and later prose writers also spelled it φάκελλος, while the metre in Euripides and Oppian requires φάκελος.^[7] Photius and the Suda equate it with φακιόλιον (phakiólion).^[7]

In Modern Greek φάκελος (fákelos) is a learned word meaning an envelope and a file of documents; the sense was taken from French enveloppe.^[10][11]

Timeline

• 5th century BC – Herodotus uses it for bundles of brushwood and of rods.^[7][9][12]
• 5th century BC – Thucydides and Euripides use it for bundles of firewood.^[7][8][12]
• 4th century BC – Aristotle spells it φάκελλος.^[7][2][12]
• 2nd–3rd century AD – Dio Cassius uses it for the Roman fasces.^[7][12]
• Modern Greek – Modern Greek φάκελος (fákelos) means an envelope and a file.^[10][11]

Meanings

Noun

1. A bundle of sticks, a faggot, especially of firewood.^[7][8]
2. The bundle of rods carried before Roman magistrates, the fasces.^[7]

Related words

• σφάκελος (sphákelos)
• φάσκωλος (pháskōlos)
• Latin fascis

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010), Etymological Dictionary of Greek, with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10, Leiden; Boston: Brill
3. ^ Beekes, Robert S. P. (2014), Pre-Greek: Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon, ed. Stefan Norbruis, Leiden; Boston: Brill
4. ^ Scarborough, Matthew (2025), PHILOGLOSSA: database of Pre-Greek and other non-Indo-European words in Ancient Greek, version 1.0
5. ^ a b Chantraine, Pierre (2009), Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots, new ed. with a supplement (Chroniques d'étymologie grecque 1–10), Paris: Klincksieck
6. ^ a b Babiniotis, Georgios (2010), Ετυμολογικό λεξικό της νέας ελληνικής γλώσσας [Etymological Dictionary of Modern Greek], Athens: Κέντρο Λεξικολογίας
7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
8. ^ a b c d Diggle, James, et al., eds. (2021), The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
9. ^ a b Keersmaekers, Alek (2021–2025), GLAUx: The Greek Language Automated corpus, https://github.com/alekkeersmaekers/glaux
10. ^ a b Ινστιτούτο Νεοελληνικών Σπουδών (Ίδρυμα Μανόλη Τριανταφυλλίδη) (1998), Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής, Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
11. ^ a b Πάπυρος–Larousse–Britannica, Μέγα Λεξικό της Ελληνικής Γλώσσας, Athens: Πάπυρος
12. ^ a b c d Rodríguez Adrados, Francisco, et al., eds. (1980–), Diccionario Griego-Español, Madrid: CSIC, http://dge.cchs.csic.es/xdge