The Origin of the Word “Disaster”: A Bad Star

When something goes terribly wrong we call it a disaster, never suspecting that we are blaming the sky. The word holds a star inside it: it comes from the negative prefix dis- (“bad,” “against”) and Latin astrum, “star,” which in turn comes from Greek ástron. A disaster was, in its most literal sense, a bad star: the unfavorable position of a heavenly body that, according to astrology, dragged humans toward misfortune. The origin of “disaster” is the fossil of an age when the blame for everything that went wrong was written in the firmament.

When destiny was read in the sky

For centuries much of Europe believed that the position of the planets and stars directly influenced life on earth: harvests, wars, illnesses and each person’s luck. This was no fringe superstition but a respected body of knowledge, taught in universities alongside astronomy and practiced by physicians and kings. Within that framework, to be born under a “good star” meant to be fortunate, while falling under a “bad” one foretold ruin.

Medieval Latin even coined the phrase astrum sinistrum, “sinister star,” for the threatening aspect of an ill-omened planet. From that same logic came the word we now use for any catastrophe. When something went wrong for no clear reason, the answer was in plain sight: the stars had aligned against you.

Dis- plus astrum: the anatomy of the word

The form is transparent. The prefix dis- signals negation, separation or opposition; it is the same one in “discord,” “disgust” and “dysfunction.” Joined to astrum it produces the idea of a “bad star” or “adverse planet.” The term took shape first in Old Occitan and Old Provençal as desastre, where astre meant “star” and, astrologically, “fortune.” From there it passed into Italian disastro, French désastre and Spanish desastre.

The root astrum is remarkably fertile: it is shared by “astronomy,” “astronaut,” “asterisk” (a little star), “astrology” and even “consider” —from con- plus sidus, “to observe the stars.” Nor is this the only word astrology tucked into the dictionary. “Influenza” —and therefore “influence”— originally named the influx that the stars poured onto the Earth, and from there the word jumped to the disease once thought to be caused by that celestial flow. As in the story of the dog days, those sweltering weeks heralded by the star Sirius, the vocabulary of heat and misfortune is full of stars.

Shakespeare’s ill-starred lovers

The word entered English as disaster toward the end of the sixteenth century, borrowed from Italian and French, and from the start it kept its astrological charge. William Shakespeare uses it repeatedly in exactly that sense. In King Lear, the character Edmund mocks the habit of blaming “the sun, the moon and the stars” for our own failings; and from that same worldview comes the famous phrase star-crossed lovers, with which the prologue of Romeo and Juliet announces a tragedy written in the sky.

It was the natural way to explain the inexplicable. Just as “panic” blamed sudden terror on a god, “disaster” blamed catastrophe on a star. Naming misfortune and placing it beyond human reach carried a kind of comfort: if the fault lay in the stars, at least it was not entirely ours.

When the word came down from the sky

Over time astrology lost its scientific standing, and “disaster” slipped free of the sky it was born under. Today we use it for an earthquake, a war, a failed exam or a burned dinner, without the faintest memory of stars. It is the same journey traveled by other words born of a belief: as with “hazard,” which began as the name of a dice game before becoming the pure idea of chance, “disaster” traveled from the vault of heaven into everyday speech and lost its literal sense along the way.

And yet the star is still there, hidden in the last four letters. The next time you call a bad day a “disaster,” remember that you are repeating, without meaning to, the verdict of an ancient astrology: that up above, at some crossing of planets, something went wrong and the worst luck fell to us. The word is a beautiful fossil of a humanity that searched the sky for the answers it could not find on earth.

References

1. “Disaster”, Online Etymology Dictionary: from the 1590s, from Italian disastro “misfortune, calamity”, from Old Provençal desastre; astrological sense of a calamity blamed on an unfavorable position of a planet, from dis- “bad” and astro “star, planet”. etymonline.com
2. “Disaster”, Merriam-Webster Dictionary: etymological note on dis- plus astro “star” and the original sense of an “unfavorable aspect of a star or planet”. merriam-webster.com
3. “Desastre”, Diccionario de la lengua española (RAE-ASALE): “great misfortune, an unhappy and lamentable event”; from Old Occitan desastre. dle.rae.es
4. “Desastre”, Diccionario etimológico (etimologias.dechile.net): from Provençal desastre, from dis- and astro; the astrological belief that celestial disorder foretold misfortune and catastrophe. etimologias.dechile.net

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