Etymograph

English

simplex

Simplex comes from Latin simplex ‘plain, simple’, and goes back to Proto-Indo-European *sm̥- ‘one’.

  1. Proto-Indo-Europeanc. 4500–2500 BCE*sm̥-‘one’reconstructed
  2. Latinc. 75 BCE–200 CEsimplex‘plain, simple’
  3. Englishearliest quotation 1978same form

attested reconstructed ? uncertain or disputed

Lineage

  1. Proto-Indo-Europeanc. 4500–2500 BCE*sm̥-‘one’reconstructed
  2. Latinc. 75 BCE–200 CEsimplex‘plain, simple’
  3. Englishearliest quotation 1978same form

Earliest quotation: 1978, Helga Harries-Delisle, Contrastive Emphasis and Cleft Sentences: “The question is: is 139. [“Priexal Vanja. ‘arrived Vanya’”]…”

The story

The adjective is a learned borrowing from Latin simplex (‘plain, simple; single’). The first part, sim-, comes from Proto-Indo-European *sem-, *sm̥- (‘one; together’). The second part, -plex, may be from *pleḱ- (‘to weave’). Noun sense 1 (‘generalization of a triangle or tetrahedron to an arbitrary dimension’) was apparently coined by the Dutch mathematician Pieter Hendrik Schoute (1846–1913) as a short version of Simplicissimum in Mehrdimensionale Geometrie (in German, 1902). (In his pioneering works on algebraic topology, the French mathematician Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) had previously introduced the concept, but not the actual term simplex.)

Every English word from Proto-Indo-European *sm̥-

Today it means

adj Having a single structure; not composite or complex; undivided, unitary.

Language periods are conventional ranges, not dates for this word.

Etymograph / Proto-Indo-European *sm̥- / simplex

Shirt and support for this word