Wode

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Old-fashioned term meaning insane or frantic with rage or passion ; an archaic name for the woad plant and the blue dye made from its leaves
2. Archaic adjective describing someone driven mad or wildly frenzied ; obsolete spelling for woad, the herb yielding a blue dye
3. Describing a person gone mad or raging, as in older English ; in earlier English, a term for the dye plant woad and its blue pigment

Etymology: The English adjective "wode," meaning mad or raging, is now archaic, but in Old English "wōd" was a strong word for violent frenzy, often used of a person possessed or driven beyond reason. Its ancestors reach back to a Proto-Germanic form, "wōdaz, and its relatives survive across the family: Dutch "woede" and German "Wut," both meaning fury or rage, show the same core sense still alive on the Continent. The deeper link is surprising. The Proto-Indo-European root, "weh₂t-, meant something like "excited" or "possessed," and it appears in Latin "vātēs," a word for a seer or prophet. The idea was that a prophet spoke under divine inspiration, a kind of frenzy, so the same root could describe the mad and the inspired alike. Modern readers should not confuse "wode" with "woad," the blue dye plant. The two words are unrelated despite their similar spelling, and they belong to different roots.