Get Yoked
I was browsing Reddit recently and came across this post about the etymology of the word zygote (a cell formed by the union of two gametes[1].) It says that the word is derived from the Greek zygotos which means “yoked.” This is confirmed by etymoline.com (one of my favorite websites), which goes on to describe how zygon (“yoke”) is thought to come from the Proto-Indo-European root yeug-, meaning “to join.” When you hear “yoke” today you probably just think of something you throw around a pair of oxen to pull your wagon[2] , and this word comes to us through Proto-Germanic (same PIE root, of course.) For the record, Merriam Webster defines it as “a wooden bar or frame by which two draft animals (such as oxen) are joined at the heads or necks for working together.”
When you look at other derivatives of yeug- things get pretty interesting. It’s listed as the source of all the “join” words (adjoin, conjoin, etc), which you’d expect, but also jugular (via the Latin iugulum, meaning “collarbone, throat, neck”, which is itself the diminutive form of iugum—“yoke”.) Make sense. What was more surprising to me was that yeug- is responsible for the word yoga, meaning joining with the Divine or the Supreme. Trippy.
Another fun one was syzygy, a potentially great Scrabble word that refers to the alignment of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system, as during an eclipse. This demonstrates a great thing about Latin and Greek, which is that if you know a few morphemes, and given a bit of context, you can roughly guess at the meaning of words derived from those languages. In this case, syn- = “together”, and we learned that zygon = “yoke.” With the hint that this has something to do with astronomy, you can kind of figure out syzygy is related to the alignment of things in outer space.
I was curious about how all this related to the term yoked, in the sense of “strong”, though I mostly came up empty handed. An Urban Dictionary entry on the word makes reference to well developed trapezius muscles, and makes specific mention of the apparatus used with oxen. This since removed webpage talks about bodybuilding and the yoke shirt measurement, though it makes no mention of the adjective. I suppose it’s possible that having a muscly neck came to be termed “yoked”, and has since come to mean generally strong.
According to the Reddit thread, a lot of this is covered in the History of English podcast, which I had never heard of, but I’m looking forward to checking it out.
[1] A gamete, in case you’ve forgotten (as I had) is a mature male or female germ cell (e.g. a sperm or egg cell.)
[2] Actually when you hear “yoke” you probably think of eggs, but “yolk” has another root entirely (it’s all about the colour yellow.)