One of my Favorite Words: Aleatoric

You know, after living for twenty-seven years and learning two and a half languages, I often think that my English knowledge must be pretty well capped out. Of course, that can’t be further from the truth. The reality is that sometimes I get into comfortable circles that use the same vocab. That all changed when I met my wife. I’m pretty sure she knows at least a thousand more English words than I do. Sometimes I’ll learn a new word at university, come home, share it, only to find out that she learned it back in the fifth grade.

I guess I have some catching up to do.

One word she didn’t know, though, was aleatoric. I came across it while at a choir rehearsal. One of our songs had a note above the lyrics that said “Aleatorics.” I had no clue what it meant at the time, but since then I’ve grown rather fond of the word. Simply stated, aleatoric means random.  In music, it means to randomly choose from one of a select set of notes and sing it at random, but the word goes beyond that.

I shared the word with a friend that speaks Spanish, and he informed me that aleatoria mean random in that language. That led me to look up how to say random in French, a language that I’m currently studying. Turns out, it’s also very similar: aléatoire.

I don’t know why this fascinates me so much, but it does. Of course, the root word comes from Latin, so it’s no wonder why the word is so similar across languages. All the same, I enjoy that knowledge. It’s a bit aleatoric, but it is now one of my favorite words.