“Politeness,” James Gillray, hand-colored etching, c. 1779
10 March 2025
[Edit, 11 March: cleaned up translation of the Trevisa quote and fixed some typos and poorly worded passages]
It is quite common for a word with a specific and literal meaning to develop figurative or metaphorical meanings that are related to the literal one. And sometimes we can see this same change across multiple languages. Such is the case with polite. The Latin verb polire means to smooth, to polish, and its past participle, politus, and adverbial form, polite, came in that language to mean cultured or refined, a metaphorical polish.
The word first is first recorded in English as a surname—a Robertus Polyte is listed in the records of the reign of Henry III for the year 1263. The adjective polite appears in English in the late-fourteenth century. The original meaning in English was a literal one of “smooth, polished.” John Trevisa’s 1397 translation of Bartholommaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things), sort of an early encyclopedia, says this about the stone beryl:
Berill is a stoon of Ynde yliche in grene colour to Smaragde but it is wiþ palenesse, and polit and schape among þe Yndes in sixe-cornerd schap þat dymnesse of colour may be excited by þe reboundyng of þe corners. And oþerwise yschape it haþ no bright schynyng.
(Beryl is a stone from India alike in its green color to emerald, but is marked by its paleness; polited [polished], and shaped in the Indies into a six-cornered shape such that the dimness of color may be excited by the reflections of the corners. And otherwise shaped it has no brilliance.)
Both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary classify Trevisa’s use of polit here as an adjective, but it is clearly fulfilling a playing role in the sentence, in apposition to paleness; we would use politeness here if writing this today. Trevisa is translating from Bartholomæus’s Latin, which may account for the OED saying the word is a direct borrowing from Latin, rather than via French, which is correct in this particular case but may not be true generally. Certainly, literate folks of the period would have been familiar with both the Latin and Old French.
Over time, polite began to be used in reference to language. Robert Henryson writes in the prologue to his translation of Aesop’s Fables, c. 1480:
Thocht fenyeit Faabillis of auld Poetrie,
Be nocht all groundit upon treuth, yt than
Thair polite termes of sweit Rethorie,
Ar richt plesand unto the eir of man.
(I think the fictitious fables of old poetry are not all grounded upon truth, but their polite terms of sweet rhetoric are right pleasant to the ear of man.)
And as with Latin, polite in English developed into a general sense of refined, cultured, elegant. Ben Jonson’s 1601 play The Fountaine of Selfe-Love has these lines:
Amor[phus]. Succinctly spoken: I doe vale to both your thanks, and kisse them; but primarily to yours, Most ingenious, acute, and polite Lady.
Phi[lautia]. Gods my life, how he do's all to be qualifie her! Ingenious, Acute, and Polite? as if there were not others in place, as Ingenious, Acute, and Polite, as she.
Hed[on]. Yes, but you must know Lady, he cannot speake out of a Dictionary method.
This sense survives today chiefly in the phrase polite society. Finally, the sense of courteous or well-mannered developed in the mid-eighteenth century.
We see the same development of meanings in French, where the word poli appears around the year 1160 with the meaning of smooth, shiny. By the late-twelfth century the word was being applied to words and diction, meaning careful, well-chosen, and it acquired the meaning of cultured in the late-sixteenth century and well-mannered in the late-seventeenth. And a similar pattern occurs at about the same time in Spanish and Italian. Interestingly in Occitan, a Romance language spoken in southern France and parts of Spain and Italy, the pattern is reversed, at least in the record. In Old Occitan the word polit was first applied metaphorically to well-chosen words in the mid-twelfth century, and the literal meaning of smooth, polished did not develop until the fourteenth century.
So we have a semantic change that occurs in Latin, then centuries later the same pattern repeats itself in a number of languages that borrowed or inherited the word with its original meaning.
Sources:
Bartholomæus Anglicus. On the Properties of Things (De proprietatibus rerum), vol 2 of 3. John Trevisa, trans, M. C Seymour, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 16.20, 837.
Close Rolls of the Reign of Henry III, vol. 12 (1261–64). London: Stationary Office, 1936, 260. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Henryson, Robert. “Prologue” to The Moral Fables of Æsop in Scottish Metre. In The Poems and Fables of Robert Henryson. David Laing, ed. Edinburgh, 1865, lines 1–4, 101. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Jonson, Ben. The Fountaine of Selfe-Loue. Or Cynthia’s Reuels. London, R. Read for Walter Burre, 1601, 4.3, sig G4r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. polit(e, adj.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. polite, adj. & n.
Image credit: James Gillray, c. 1779. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.