I took a look at a few news sources to see how they were using the word secular. Almost unerringly they juxtaposed secular against religious. Many citations were talking about secular governments in Muslim countries but there were also lots of instances of secular relating to the business world of the west as contrasted with a more spiritual world.

So to most of us secular means “not religious.” Like a bank would be a secular institution, a church or mosque a religious institution.

The reason I’m talking about secular as a word today is because when I went to look up its etymology I found that it came from Latin through Old French and into English. But what didn’t make any sense to me at first was that the Latin word had a completely different meaning than the English word.

What happened there?

In Latin saeculum meant a generation or an age; that is, the length of time of a lifespan. From its earliest appearance in English almost 700 years ago it meant something pretty close to what we mean now. Why the difference?

I can only speculate but it seems to me that a word that describes a length of time in terms of a human lifespan might easily be related to a sense of our mortality. In a context that compares mortality to spirituality, with heaven and an afterlife, a sense of secular as “of this world” could easily emerge. If this is what happened, it seems to have happened in Latin before coming into English.

In English, during the late 16th century people were dipping into Latin for fancy words to express themselves with in a rapidly expanding Language and the word secular made a second appearance, this time with its old, original Latin meaning. But this time it only seemed to catch on in specialist academic circles. People still seem to use the word secular to mean a very long period of time, but the more recent citations I see seem to come from papers on economics and statistics. In this sense secular no longer refers to a human lifespan, but seemingly to some cycle of time that is so long we haven’t yet figured out just how long it is.

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