“Excellent, Watson! You scintillate today.” — Arthur Conan Doyle, 1924
Wednesday marked the beginning of Lent, the Christian season consisting of 40 days leading up to Easter.
I was recently listening to the late actor Robert Hardy reading some Sherlock Holmes stories on Audible (he’s really marvelous — I highly recommend it), when I noticed a quick succession of words ending in “-lent” in the story “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.”
It reminded me of the beginning of this season where so many people give something up. I’ve always been of the mind that it’s better to take something on for 40 days: practicing gratitude, offering a kindness, and bettering yourself.
In that spirit, let’s learn a little something about lent — the suffix, not the season.
The word “Lent” comes from the Middle English word lente, which means “springtime.” It is a shortened form of the Old English word lencten, which means “spring season.”
This makes sense. Lent occurs in conjunction with the spring.
In English, the suffix “-lent” has the meaning “having in quantity, full of.” It is a variation of the suffix “-ulent” and is found in loanwords from Latin.
The Latin suffix “-lentus” has a similar meaning to “-osus” and also means “full of.” When this element is added to the base of a Latin noun, it must be joined by a linking vowel.
All of this makes great sense, as spring is a time of renewal as the trees and flowers bloom, on their way to fullness once again.
Applying that to the Sherlock Holmes stories, let’s have a look at various small-l “lenten” words that Arthur Conan Doyle used in the 60 stories that comprise the Sherlock Holmes canon.
The three most frequently used words with this suffix are violent, silent, and excellent. Violent occurs 37 times, silent 107 times, and excellent 131 times.
This makes perfect sense, as these are rather common words — and when you consider the nature of Sherlock Holmes’s investigations, violence and silence are the antithesis of each other.
But other words that come up are more fascinating, which we’ll explore below, with a reference to each of them. All definitions are via Merriam-Webster.
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