Q. I recently read an etymology for the word sincere, and I am wondering if it is true.

According to this account, in the Middle Ages, and during the Renaissance, many of the great works of art we think of in connection with great artists were often completed by numerous students and artisans, in the style of the master who taught them, and it is his name we associate with the finished product. If a chunk was chipped off, it was repaired and replaced with a type of wax which hardened. This wax was called cere; it's probably a root word of today’s ceramics. If a sculpture was completed with no blemishes or chips, it was said to be cin-cere—without wax. More recently, this has come to be connected with morality and honesty.

A: The "without wax" derivation of sincere is one that we've heard for ages now, it seems, but there is no evidence that sincere ever had anything to do with craftsmanship, statues, or wax. According to our sources, sincere is from the Middle French sincere, meaning “honest," which in turn derived from the Latin sincerus, meaning "whole, unsullied, pure, honest, genuine." Sincerus most likely derives from sem- or sim- (a Latin root word meaning "one") and –cerus, which is most likely akin to the Latin verb creare, meaning “to create." We can say it is clearly not related to the Latin cera, "wax." We have ample evidence of the Latin sincerus through Classical and Medieval Latin, and it has never been used to describe anything having to do with "wax." Sincerus has meant "honest, pure, genuine, whole" since the classical era.

This is all by way of saying that the "without wax" story is just that—a story. It is a good one and makes for great copy, as they say, which is why it is so oft repeated. But unless we see some new evidence of early uses of sincere that make the connection between honesty and wax clear, we have to reject this explanation.

Q. I'm doing research on words that get in the dictionary because of their popularity in science fiction (words such as grok, android, etc.). I know that the earliest citation for grok comes from Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, but I don’t know about android. Can you help?

A. The earliest citation for android that we’ve seen comes from Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, first published in 1728 and expanded and republished several more times throughout the 18th century.

This quotation comes from the 1700s:

"Albertus Magnus is recorded as having made a famous androides." — from the entry androids

It seems that android didn't acquire its current spelling until the mid-1800s.

If you want an example from something that is recognizably science fiction, then maybe this Clifford D. Simak citation will do:

"Human gossip as well as android and robot gossip." — Time & Again, 1951

Our entry for grok mentions Heinlein because it's known that he invented the word. However, in the vast majority of cases, no one knows who came up with a particular word or in what context it was first used. Android has been around in some form or another for a couple hundred years, and since we have no way of knowing who first thought of that word, we can't say anything more specific in the etymology. Grok is one of the rare examples of a word that can be traced back to a specific creator and context.