The 'Without Wax' Story Behind 'Sincere' Is Folk Etymology
The "without wax" origin story is folk etymology — and it has been fooling people in print since the 1600s.
Roman sculptors hid flaws in marble with tinted wax, the story goes, so honest pieces sold sine cera — "without wax." Honey vendors in the forum cried it out. Cabinet makers put it on their work. The English word "sincere" supposedly carries that promise still.
The Oxford English Dictionary has been killing this myth for over a century. "There is no probability in the old explanation," the OED says, flatly. Etymonline marks it "untenable." Patricia O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, who run Grammarphobia, found printed versions of the wax story going back to the early 1600s — meaning the folk etymology is roughly as old as the word's English use.
The actual root is duller and more interesting. Sincere entered English in the 1530s from Latin sincerus, meaning whole, clean, unmixed. The first syllable is not sine, "without." It is likely cognate with the sim- in simplus — Proto-Indo-European *sem-, "one." The second piece traces to crescere, "to grow." Sincerus describes something of one growth: not hybrid, not blended, not patched together from parts.
The word does mean unmixed. It just has nothing to do with wax, sculptors, or marketplace honey. The myth survives because it's a better story than the truth, and because Dan Brown built a plot point on it in Digital Fortress in 2008.
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