A Prayer to a Divinity Trivia Quiz

Answer: Payer

A payer is someone who is responsible for paying over money to another person or to an organisation. Payments made can be for many things, and examples are for food from a supermarket or rent for an apartment, and for taxes of different kinds levied by national and local government departments. A payee is the person or body who receives the payment, whether in cash, by cheque or electronically.

The nouns 'payer' and 'payee' are related to the verb 'pay', which comes from the ancient Latin word 'pacare'. This originally meant 'to pacify' but came to have the meaning of 'to settle' or 'to satisfy' in the Latin of the Middle Ages. 'Pacare' also evolved into the Old French 'paiier' then the Middle English 'payen', both having the meaning of 'to pay'.

As well as a financial payer, someone can be a payer of compliments or can pay their respects by making a point of seeing or visiting someone to speak to them, possibly in a formal way. One can also pay one's respects to a deceased person by attending their funeral.

Answer: Pear

Pear trees are native to temperate areas of Westen Europe, North Africa and parts of Asia. The fruit has a roundish shape which tapers towards the stem, from which it hangs down on the trees. There are some three thousand varieties of pear and most are in one of the three main species of edible pears, which are the European, the Nashi and the Chinese pears, with the last one accounting for the majority of those grown.

The pear fruit usually has a green skin and is sweetish in taste. Generally pears are harvested between late summer and late autumn and the fruit can be eaten raw or as a cooked dessert. They can also be canned for later consumption or can be fermented to make an alcoholic drink named perry.

The word 'pear' seems to have developed from the Vulgar Latin 'pira', which evolved into the Proto-Germanic 'peru' then the Old English and Middle English 'pere'. The word evolved similarly in a number of north European languages, for example into such cognates as the Dutch 'peer', the Danish 'paere' and the Icelandic 'pera'.

Answer: Leap

Like its synonym 'jump', the word 'leap' can be used as a noun or verb in different situations. It can refer to a physical movement, for instance in the phrases 'to leap over a puddle' or 'to leap to one's feet' or it can be used in a non-physical sense. Examples of its use as a verb and as a noun in the latter sense are 'to leap at a chance to do something' and 'shares leaped by ten per cent' and 'a great leap forward' and 'a leap in the dark' respectively.

Used as a noun, leap is also a collective word for a group of leopards while a leap year is one that occurs every four years and has one extra day. It seems uncertain how the term came about but it has been suggested that, whereas the other three years in the cycle advance the date by one day from the previous year, the leap year advances it by two days so leaping a day.

The word 'leap' developed from the Proto-Germanic word 'hlaupaną', which evolved into the Anglo-Saxon/Old English 'hlēapan'. Like other words of Gemanic origin, this then lost the initial letter 'h' to become the Middle English 'lepen' and continued evolving to become the Modern English 'leap'.

Answer: Nepal

Nepal is a landlocked country that is situated mostly on the southern slopes of the Himalayan mountain range but also includes some lower forested hills and fertile plains. It contains, or partly contains, eight out of ten of the highest mountains in the world, and is bordered to the east, south and west by India and to the north by Tibet. The country is some 500 miles long from east to west and an average of about 120 miles wide from north to south.

The country's capital and largest city is Kathmandu and its form of government is a federal republic. Although it is officially a secular country, over eighty per cent of the population are Hindus. Nepal's flag is the only one in the world to be formed of a double pennant or two triangular shapes, one above the other, with a white crescent moon under a part sun on the upper triangle and a whole white sun on the lower triangle, both on a red background.

Answer: Alien

The word 'alien' seems to be from the Latin word 'alienus' meaning 'foreign' or the related Latin 'alius' meaning 'other'. The word or words developed over time into the English word 'alien', possibly via the French word 'aliene'. Used as a noun, 'alien' can refer to an extraterrestrial from another planet or to someone from another country and sometimes has a negative connotation.

The word can also be used in phrases such as 'it is all alien to me', which indicates the speaker is unfamiliar with something and as an adjective, for instance in the phrase 'an alien world'. The related verb is alienate, meaning either not feeling part of something, or acting in a way that others do not like/agree with, as in 'his egotistical behaviour alienated the rest of the team'.

One well-known use of the word 'alien' is as the title of the 1979 movie 'Alien' starring Sigourney Weaver, which was the start of a series of movies featuring one or more large aliens which are inimical to other life forms. Another type of alien, here a small benevolent one, was depicted in the later 1982 movie 'E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial', which was produced and directed by Steven Spielberg.
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Answer: Inlet

An inlet is a usually small body of water and the word can refer to a strip of water that leads from a sea or river into another, usually enclosed, large body of water such as a lake or inland sea. It can also be used for a noticeable indentation of a coastline, such as a cove or a fjord created by glaciation in past ages. Inlets with several arms may be known as sounds, for instance Puget Sound in the US state of Washington or Howe Sound in British Columbia, Canada.

The word 'inlet' can be traced back to the Middle English words 'inlate' and the related 'inleten' meaning 'entrance' and 'to let in' respectively. Its origin was probably in an earlier Germanic language and other North European languages have cognates, such as the Low German 'inlat' and the Dutch 'inlaten'.

The word 'inlet' has more recently been applied to describe a tube, cone or valve through which fluid is admitted into an engine or other machine/device, while an appliance inlet is a power connector that receives electrical power.

Answer: Tine

The word 'tine' is mainly used for a prong on a fork but can also refer to one of the sharp prongs of a pitchfork or a tooth of a comb. It is also used to describe one of the sharp end points of a deer's antlers with, for example, the third prong from the base of a stag's antlers being named the 'royal antler' or 'tres-tine/trez-tine'.

The precursor of 'tine' is believed to have been the old High German word 'zint', which had equivalents in the Old Norse words 'tindr' and 'tyna', all having the meaning of 'prong'. This evolved into the Middle English 'tind' and then 'tyne'. The earliest known and possibly isolated use of 'tine' itself was in 'Cursor Mundi', a fourteenth century poem from Northumbria in Northeast England.

Although having a long history, the word has comparatively recently been used in at least one different way. A medical procedure that was developed as a screening test to find out whether someone was, or had been, infected with tuberculosis was named the 'tine test'. In this procedure the skin of someone's forearm has several small tines coated with tuberculin antigen pressed into it. If a hard red area develops this indicates possible infection and that further testing is needed.

Answer: Item

The word 'item' was originally a Latin adverb composed of the stem word 'ita' meaning 'thus' and the adverbial stem '-tem'. It then meant 'likewise' or 'just so' but, after being adopted into the English language, usage of the word evolved over the years and by the Middle English of the fourteenth century it had changed its meaning.

In Latin the adverb 'item' had been used to introduce a new statement but in Middle English (and the French of that time) the word was used before, for instance, each thing or article in a list or a bill. This led to it becoming regarded and used as a noun in its own right and by the early nineteenth century it was being used to mean a detail or piece of information.

Now the word 'item' can be used for something that is part of a list or set of things and to refer to something standing on its own. As a few examples, it can refer to one entry on a menu or on an agenda but also to an individual piece of local gossip or news on the media. The word can also refer to something more substantial, such as a piece of clothing, and one colloquial use of the word from the later twentieth century onwards is in describing two people who are in a romantic/sexual relationship as 'an item'.

Answer: Tide

Tides are the periodic rising and falling of sea levels with the cycle of a high tide followed by a low tide generally occurring twice a day. A tide's movement is caused by the gravitational force exerted mainly by the moon and partly by the sun and at certain times the level of the tides in a particular place can change more than usual. For instance, a tidal bore is a current of water that surges from the sea along a river against its current and examples of this are the Severn Bore along the River Severn in Wales and the largest tidal bore in the world along the Qiantang River in China.

The word 'tide' can also be used in other contexts, such as in the phrase 'a tide of protest', and was once used to mean 'time'. In Old English the ancestor of the current word 'tide' was 'tīd', which then meant 'time' or 'period' and, like its Dutch cognate, came from the Middle Low German word 'getīde'. It was not until quite some time later that 'tide' started to have its now more usual meaning.

Composite words using 'tide' in the sense of 'time' include 'eventide', 'noontide', 'wintertide' and 'summertide'. Another composite word is 'Lammastide', also known as 'Lammas Day', which was a day in August when the harvest of a year's wheat crop was celebrated. 'Lammas' itself comes from the Old English word 'hlāfmęsse' meaning 'loaf-mass' and refers to the fact that the first loaves made from a year's harvest were blessed in a church service.

Answer: Deity

The Latin word 'deus' or 'divus' meaning 'god' evolved into the Late Latin word 'deitas' and then, via the Old French 'deite', into the Middle English 'deitee' and hence to the modern word 'deity'.

Like its synonym 'divinity', the word 'deity' refers to a god or goddess, a being considered more powerful than humans and often one to be worshipped. The concept of deities or gods varies between peoples and religions with, for instance, Muslims believing in one god and the ancient Greeks and Romans having believed in multiple gods. Christians believe in one god consisting of three parts and these are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Other peoples perceived some of their deities as being partly animal in form or as including those in both human form and animal form. The ancient Egyptians worshipped both human-shaped gods, for instance Osiris, and gods with a human body but an animal's head, such as the cat-headed Bastet. The Shinto religion includes gods in human form, such as Omoikane, and those in animal form, for instance the crow Yatagarasu.