Volume 18 , Issue 42

NEWS Compounded From Initials of Four Principal Points of Compass (N.E.W.S.) Is A Fallacy

WOW! I did not realize this until I was researching through old news archives, especially the Weekly Atchison Champion, out of Atchison, Kansas, dated 30 July 1870, Saturday, page 2: "NEWS." It was a pretty conjecture, only it had not a morsel of foundation, though.

Found on Newspapers.com

It states: "For the thousandth time a paragraph is journeying through the journals, informing the ignorant that the word "News" is compounded from the initials of the four principal points of the compass, thus: N. E. W. S. It is a pretty conjecture, only it has not a morsel of foundation.

"News" is simply a plural constructed from "New," and "New" comes to us regularly from he Latin "Novus." The old Latin for "News" was "Res Novae," and the word reached, merely changed in spelling and pronunciation, through the medium of the southern and western dialects. That were are reminded by it of the points of the compass, is only one of those philological accidents which are continually leading ingenious people astray, and which have especially occasioned numberless blunders in regard to the origin of surnames.

[New - Old English nīwe, nēowe, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch nieuw and German neu, from an Indo-European root shared by Sanskrit nava,Latin novus, and Greek neos ‘new.’]
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