Word of the Week: skříň – ‘cupboard’

A skříň in Czech is a cupboard or a cabinet, like the type you find in a kitchen. Yet this ordinary Czech word has an English cousin that’s had a religious conversion.

This word came into Czech from speakers of Old High German, a language that had in turn acquired it from Latin scrīnium. For the Romans, a scrīnium was a case or a chest, not too far in meaning from a cupboard.

Notice how the two Is in scrīnium, having made it into Czech, then affected the sound of the preceding consonants. They changed (‘palatalised’) the original R and N, turning them into Ř and Ň.

As the Roman world became more Christian, scrīnium took on a new meaning. It came to be used for a box that contained previous religious artefacts, like the relics and remains of saints. It was with this meaning that scrīnium entered the Old English language, becoming sċrīn (pronounced like ‘shreen’). A few centuries later, we have the word shrine.