621: -spire Aug 20, 2016

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When something is important to people, it tends to be incorporated into language even if the meanings do not entirely make sense. 'Respire' means, usually for literary purposes, "to recover hope and strength", but more commonly the word just means 'to breathe'. That word comes from the Latin root, 'spire' meaning 'to breathe', but 'respire' is not the only word in English to derive from it. Some of the words now still relate in some way to breath, such as 'perspire' which in Latin meant 'breathe through'. Plenty of words branched off from the meaning of the different parts that make it up, fairly soon after their creation even. 'Conspire', 'inspire' and 'transpire' all come ultimately from that same Latin root, yet the prefixes mean 'together', 'in' and 'across' respectively, which do not relate to the meanings that the words carry today. 'Spire' on its own however, though it still does not relate to breathing is not related to the Latin 'spire'.

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