Learn English – Relationship between kingdom, dominion, and doom

etymology

I was struck recently by the -dom suffix in freedom and kingdom. Not having etymology references at hand, our lunchtime group settled on the theory that -dom in both these words was from "dominion." Dominion is ultimately derived from Latin dominus (lord of the house), if I understand my etymology correctly. It seems to make sense; free from domination is freedom, domination by a king is kingdom.

But it seems that this is not the case. According to Etymology Online, this -dom is derived from Old English dom (judgement, law, statute) and is etymologically close to doom.

I'm really confused by this origin. It seems like the dom- prefix and the -dom suffix should be related. Are they really not, or is it only that my references don't go back far enough or that my etymological understanding is superficial at best? Can someone please clarify the etymology of kingdom, dominion, and doom for me?

Best Answer

As your dictionary told you, the resemblance between the -dom suffix and the dom- prefix is coincidental. In European languages in general, affixes are either prefixes or suffixes, but very rarely both. I'm not aware of any affix at all in English that can be both a prefix and a suffix, so the fact that dom seems to occur in both places is a pretty big clue that the two roots are unrelated.

And dom- is not really a prefix. Rather, it's from Latin dominus "lord", which is in turn related to domus "home, house". Words that come directly from dominus include dominion, dominate, domain, while words coming from domus include domestic, domicile.

Now, the English suffix -dom comes from OE dom, which is a different word entirely meaning "state, condition, authority, jurisdiction", which despite its similarity in meaning and form is not related in any way to Latin domus. Rather, it comes from Proto-Germanic *dōmaz, from a stem verb originally meaning ‘to place, to set’