Salire

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To ascend or climb upward; to mount onto a surface or object; to increase or rise in value or intensity
2. The act of moving up or scaling higher levels; getting onto something elevated; experiencing a growth or escalation in quantity or strength
3. Describing motion toward a higher point; stepping onto a raised place; showing an upward trend in amount, degree, or status

Etymology: "Salire" is the Latin verb meaning "to leap" or "to jump," and it survives in English mainly through its past participle "salient," meaning "leaping forth" or, by extension, "projecting outward." The Latin verb itself is a Latin word of ancient origin, and it does not come from Greek or from any English-relevant ancestor, so its history belongs to Latin rather than English. The verb's meaning is more physical than its gloss suggests. Latin "salire" describes a sudden upward spring, the motion of a jumping animal or a leaping wave, and this same idea of something bursting forward gave English "salient" in the sense of a projecting point of a fortification, a bulge in a military line that juts toward the enemy. The adjective "salient" in its modern sense of "most noticeable" is a later extension of that outward-thrusting image. Note that the gloss given here, "to climb up," is not the standard sense of "salire." The Latin verb's core meaning is "to leap or jump," and a reader looking up "climb" should know that climbing is a looser, secondary connotation at most.