Word of the day

Quincunx: KWIN-kunks\ noun
an arrangement of five things in a square or rectangle with one at each corner and one in the middle.

The word comes from Latin, in which it literally means “five twelfths”, from quinque, five, plus uncia, a twelfth.

Learned Englishmen brought it into the language in the seventeenth century to refer to things arranged in this characteristic way. An early user was Sir Thomas Browne, in his Garden of Cyrus of 1658; this is a work of fantasy in which he traces the history of horticulture down to the time of the Persian King Cyrus. The king is credited with having been the first to plant trees in a quincunx, though Browne claimed to have discovered that it also appeared in the hanging gardens of Babylon. The diarist John Evelyn soon followed Sir Thomas’s lead—in his book on orcharding, Pomona, he suggested it was a convenient way to lay out apple or pear trees. At about the same period, quincunx began to be used in astrology to refer to an aspect of planets that are five signs of the zodiac apart (out of the twelve).
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