Verse, Verses, and Versus

You start with a Latin word, as is so often the case.

This root word is vertere, which means to turn. It comes from a much older Proto-Indo-European root word that means all sorts of things today, but let’s just focus on vertere.

Turning can mean a lot of things in a lot of different contexts, and the ancient Romans were just like us in this regard. If there was a need, a word could suddenly stretch its properties just a bit, offering a useful analogy, or even morphing its underlying meaning to match the new need.

Naturally, vertere was useful to describe turning over a field so that crops would grow there. This practice was very old by the time the Romans came around, so it was a fruitful fishing spot for the sort of etymological drift we just discussed.

These lines in a field were straight and orderly, making the turning work much more practical. It was only natural for this word to be used to describe the lines in a poem, which seemed to turn over at the end just like those plowed lines in a field.

A single line in Latin became known as a versus, and when this made its way to English, the -us ending was dropped, so we ended up with verse today.

Now, let’s keep in mind that versus, which was now used in Latin for a line of poetry, literally meant an instance of turning. It was a noun, not a verb, so it’s really interesting to me that we ended up with versus becoming a preposition—something that modifies a noun.

This is a different sort of linguistic evolution than I’ve been discussing so far. Here, the word changed its form instead of its meaning.

It’s even more interesting that versus morphed into verse, with its meaning slightly modified when it made its way into English. But then, versus made a comeback of sorts, returning in its original form, and derived from its original OG Latin meaning, to turn. When someone is versus another person, they are turning to face them.

There are lots of vertere words around today. Besides verse and versus, you have invert, controversial, version, and subvert. If you see a vert or a verse, you’re almost certainly seeing a long etymological journey upwards from vertere.