Where does corona come from?

Flowers and crows, priests and soldiers, suns and moons, kings and queens, lagers and viruses? What could all these disparate things possibly have in common? Well, in one way or another, they are involved in the rich history of the word corona.

Corona entered English around 1555–65. It was borrowed directly from the Latin corōna, meaning “garland, wreath, crown.” Its plural form is corōnae. A verb form of corōna was corōnāre, “to crown, wreathe,” ultimate source of the English coronation, “the act or ceremony of crowning a king, queen, or other sovereign.”

Let’s start with a glimpse into life in ancient Rome. Back then, a corōna served various ceremonial and symbolic functions. People wore corōnae of flowers at festivals, for example, or used them to ornament images of gods. Priests donned corōnae when performing important rituals and sacrifices.

Different types of corōna were used as military decorations honoring various acts of bravery. For instance, the corōna mūrālis, or “walled crown,” was a gold crown fashioned in the shape of battlements and was awarded to a soldier who was the first to enter a besieged town or fortress. One especially high honor was the corōna cīvica, bestowed on a citizen who saved a fellow citizen’s life. It was also known as corōna querca, or “oak crown,” because it was made with oak leaves. This crown became a symbol for emperors and appeared on coins.

Outside of literal crowns worn on the head, the Latin corōna could be used for various things that resemble crowns in their form, including cornices and the halo around the sun. These applications of corōna informed the earliest uses of the word in English.

The oldest recorded sense of corona in English refers to the projecting, slab-like part of a classical cornice. Next up in English’s record, evidenced around the mid-1600s, is corona meaning “a ring of light, as around the sun or moon”—like a figurative crown atop the head of a celestial body. Today, astronomers specifically use corona for the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere, which is visible during a total solar eclipse.

Dig deeper

As we’ve seen, corona comes from the Latin word for “crown.” So does the very word crown!

Much older than corona, crown is found in English around 1125–1175. Crown developed from the Middle English coroune, among other forms, which came from the Anglo-French coroune, in turn from the Latin corona.

Now, the Latin corōna has its own fascinating past. It was borrowed from the ancient Greek korṓnē, a word used for a kind of crow or seabird, as well as for anything curved or hooked, presumably due to the shape of the beak of such birds.