paradise

Word History: From an etymological perspective at least, paradise is located in ancient Iran—for it is there that the word paradise ultimately originates. The old Iranian language Avestan had a noun pairidaēza-, "a wall enclosing a garden or orchard," which is composed of pairi-, "around," and daēza- "wall." The adverb and preposition pairi is related to the equivalent Greek form peri, as in perimeter. Daēza- comes from the Indo-European root *dheigh-, "to mold, form, shape." Zoroastrian religion encouraged maintaining arbors, orchards, and gardens, and even the kings of austere Sparta were edified by seeing the Great King of Persia planting and maintaining his own trees in his own garden. Xenophon, a Greek mercenary soldier who spent some time in the Persian army and later wrote histories, recorded the pairidaēza- surrounding the orchard as paradeisos, using it not to refer to the wall itself but to the huge parks that Persian nobles loved to build and hunt in. This Greek word was used in the Septuagint translation of Genesis to refer to the Garden of Eden, and then Latin translations of the Bible used the Greek word in its Latinized form, paradisus. The Latin word was then borrowed into Old English and used to designate the Garden of Eden. In Middle English, the form of the word was influenced by its Old French equivalent, paradis, and it is from such Middle English forms as paradis that our Modern English word descends.