Incommodious and incómodo: which came first?

Question

So I was just overheard someone use the word incommodious to mean uncomfortable, and I immediately thought about incómodo and the relation there. Is this a cognate or something else? Is every word somehow linked with another word? I have never heard incommodious until now and I am quite well read by most people's standards.

Answer 1

I love the word 'incommodious'. I throw it into conversations whenever possible. They are cognates, but neither came from the other; they both came from the Latin. 'Incommodious' came into use in English in the mid 1500s. I would guess that incómodo came to Spanish before that, just because it's from the Latin, and so it probably came with Spanish when it evolved from Vulgar Latin. I don't know that for sure, though, as the DRAE doesn't include dates.

What? You do not. ;) - jeezzle, Sep 17, 2010

I most certainly do. It's just that "whenever possible" isn't very often. - MacFadden, Sep 17, 2010

Tsk, tsk! - LateToDinner, Sep 17, 2010

Answer 2

"Incommodious" is not Spanish. Words that typically end in "-ous" in Latin normally end in "o" in modern Spanish.

Yes, it is English not Spanish. Gracias, just wondering about the chicken and the egg bit of it all. :) - jeezzle, Sep 17, 2010

Answer 3

As Lazarus said, both incommodius and incómodo come from the same Latin root. It's hard to say which one evolved first. A lot of Latin-based English words came from either the Catholic church or via Norman French after the conquest in 1066.