Q. I notice that you now have decumulation listed as a word in the dictionary. How long has this word been listed and do you have a ruling on the correct spelling? Is it decumulation or deaccumulation?

A. Decumulation was added to our Unabridged dictionary in 1981, and the evidence in our files dates back to 1945. The older evidence shows that the words decumulate and decumulation were mostly used in business writing with regard to inventory. The first citation for the noun, from the Journal of Political Economy in 1948, shows the context clearly: "rapid inventory accumulation or decumulation." As for your second question, evidence from our citation files shows that the form decumulation is favored over deaccumulation by a significant degree.

Q. My professor says that the word sincere comes from the Latin sin cera, meaning "without wax." Roman merchants would claim that their marble was "without wax," meaning that no wax had been used to cover over cracks or flaws in the stone. Hence, sincere. Is that correct?

A. The sine cera idea is the equivalent of a Roman urban legend. Sine was not used to form compounds in classical Latin. (Note that without is sine, not sin.) The correct equivalent would be with the privative prefix se, which would result in secerus, but no such word exists.

The actual ancestor of sincere is the Latin sincerus, meaning "whole, pure, genuine." Sincerus is likely a combination of sem-, meaning "one" and cerus, which is akin to the Latin crescere, meaning "to grow."

Q. Could inoculate share an ancestry with innocuous?

A. Although similar in structure, the two words are not related. Innocuous traces back to the Latin word nocere, meaning to harm, while inoculate comes from a Middle English word meaning "to insert a bud in a plant," and traces back to the Latin word oculus, meaning eye or bud. It is curious that English adopted these two distinct Latin words and developed them into words that semantically have something in common.