hostipitalité - φιλοεχθροξενία

hospital [13]
Like hospices, hostels, and hotels, hospitals were originally simply places at which guests were received. The word comes via Old French hospital from medieval Latin hospitāle, a noun use of the adjective hospitālis ‘of a guest’. This in turn was derived from hospit-, the stem of Latin hospes ‘guest, host’. In English, hospital began its semantic shift in the 15th century, being used for a ‘home for the elderly or infirm, or for down-and-outs’; and the modern sense ‘place where the sick are treated’ first appeared in the 16th century. The original notion of ‘receiving guests’ survives, of course, in hospitality [14] and hospitable [16]. Hospice [19] comes via French from Latin hospiti um ‘hospitality’, another derivative of hospes.

host Indo-European * ghostis denoted ‘stranger’. From it were descended Germanic * gastiz (source of English guest), Greek xénos ‘guest, stranger’ (source of English xenon and xenophobia), and Latin hostis ‘stranger, enemy’. This original meaning is retained in the derived adjective hostile [16], but the noun itself in postclassical times came to mean ‘army’, and that is where (via Old French) English got host ‘army’ [13] from. Its main modern sense, ‘large number’, is a 17th-century development. But Latin had another noun, hospes ‘host’, which was probably derived from hostis. Its stem form, hospit-, passed into Old French as hoste (whose modern French descendant hôte means both ‘host’ and ‘guest’). English borrowed this in the 13th century, giving it a second noun host, quite distinct in meaning, but ultimately of the same origin. (Other English words that owe their existence to Latin hospes include hospice, hospital, hostel, hotel, and ostler.) But that is not the end of the host story. English has yet another noun host, meaning ‘bread of the Eucharist’ [14]. This comes via Old French hoiste from Latin hostia ‘sacrifice, victim’.​