Wing IV · Semantic lineage
fracture
Oldest known meaning — a breaking, a breach.
a breaking → a broken bone → a crack or division
Excavation timeline
How the meaning shifted
Etymological strata
Layers of descent
- frangere → fractūraLatin · classical
Latin — to break; a breach
- fractureOld French · 14c.
Old French — a breaking
- fractureModern English · early 15c.
English — a break, especially of a bone
Constellation
Descendants & cognates
Inner ring — modern descendants of the same root. Outer ring — cognates in sister languages. Gold descendants link to their specimen.
Semantic drift
How the sense moved
Frangere ('to break') seeds a family about brokenness and breakability: fragile (easily broken), fragment (a broken piece), fraction (a broken-off part), even frail. Where rupture stresses the bursting event, fracture stresses the resulting crack — the line where the break runs.
Metaphorical expansion
Where the word reaches now
Cultural sediment
The worldview inside the word
Fracture's image is geological as much as medical — a crack that propagates, splitting what looked solid.
Related descendants
Words from the same root
Sources
Confidence & citations
Lineage confidence · Well attested
- · Online Etymology Dictionary
- · OED, s.v. fracture