cuvânt

Where it comes from

Inherited from Latin conventus (“convened, assembled; agreement, coming together, gathering”). The sense may have shifted from that of "a coming together, agreement, assembly" to that of "word" because at important assemblies and gatherings in the past, there was an exchange of words and ideas. Cf. also the related Albanian kuvend (which may have influenced its meaning) and Aromanian cuvendã, and also Greek κουβέντα (kouvénta, “conversation; word, phrase”), derived from the same Latin word. A similar semantic shift occurred in Macedonian (another member of the Balkan sprachbund), where збор (zbor), deriving from the Slavic word for "meeting, gathering, assembly", came to mean "word". This may have been adopted from nearby speakers of Proto-Albanian or Proto-Romanian.