WHAT’S THAT SOUND?

The word sound has three different meanings. We’re most familiar with sound meaning “noise,” which is from the Latin sonus and is related to sonogram, song, sonnet, and even swan (“the sounding bird”). The sound meaning “unimpaired” comes from the German gesund (“healthy”) and is related to gesundheit. And the sound meaning “body of water” makes a splashy connection to the Old English verb swimman (“to swim”).