Hoorah! It’s the spring or vernal equinox

Today marks the vernal equinox. The event that ought to herald spring, despite the less than springlike weather Britain has been enjoying recently. While the meteorologists have already kicked ‘spring’ off to a start at the beginning of the month, today is when ‘astronomical spring’ begins.

So what is an equinox, and why is this one vernal?

Vernal equinox sounds like double dutch. Actually, it’s double—or even triple—Latin.

An equinox, as Webster’s New College Dictionary, 4th edn defines it, is:

the time when the sun in its apparent annual movement along the ecliptic crosses the celestial equator, making night and day of equal length in all parts of the earth.

In theory, day and night should therefore be twelve hours each, but because of the earth’s atmosphere refracting the sun’s rays, the day will last about ten minutes longer than that in Britain.

The -nox part of equinox comes from the Latin for ‘night’. If you go back far enough in the mists of time, night is related to nox and also Classical Greek νυκτ-, νύξ, and Sanskrit nak, all of which derive from a hypothesised common ancestor in Proto-Indo-European, *nókʷts.

From nox, or more strictly, its stem, noct-, we get several English words, but the only ones you’re likely to encounter are nocturnal, musical or pictorial nocturnes, and, just possibly, noctambulism, aka sleepwalking.

The equi- part is from the same Latin word æquus ‘equal’ which has given us equidistant, equitable, and equity.

What about the vernal bit?

Think of Botticelli’s world-famous image: La Primavera.

Primavera means, literally, ‘first spring’. The -vera part comes from the Latin word for spring, ver.

From that Latin also derives English vernal, meaning ‘of or relating to the spring’. But it’s not a word you’ll come across often outside literature.

As thick as bees o’er vernal blossoms fly.

Alexander Pope

or

It was a beautiful morning, of that soft vernal temperature, that seems to thaw all the frost out of one’s blood.

1822   Washington Irving, Bracebridge Hall xix

How do some other languages denote the equinox?

The Romance languages, as you might expect, have Latinate forms: French équinoxe, Spanish equinoccio, Italian equinozio, Romanian echinocţiu. In the Romanian form, the -ch- is pronounced /k/ and the letter t with a cedilla stands for the sound /t͡s/. 

Instead of bamboozling their speakers with ‘furrin‘ words, Some other languages just sort of do ‘what it says on the tin’ and call it something like ‘equal day and night’. Thus, German has die Tagundnachtgleiche (‘dayandnightequalness) and Russian has равноденствие, ‘same-day-ness’, derived from From ра́вный (rávnyj; ‘equal’) +‎ -о- (-o-) +‎ день (denʹ; ‘day’) +‎ –ство (-stvo; noun-forming suffix) +‎ –ие (-ije; neuter noun ending). Danish follows a similar pattern with its jævndøgn, literally, ‘evenness of the (24-hour) day’. 

Image: Courtesy of Stefan Schauberger on Unsplash.

And if you feel like celebrating wiht a classic risotto primavera, there’s a recipe here. The image is the best I could find, royalty-free, for risottos, but may not be a primavera.

This is an updated version of a post from 2013.