American Scientist

The word infrastructure, which was so much in the news when administrations were changing in Washington early this year, is both old and new. Today, “infrastructure” connotes the under-building of a society’s physical improvements and denotes the public works (that is, improvements and systems like roads, bridges, airports, water supply and waste removal), and increasingly also the works of private enterprise (for example, fiber-optic, wireless, cellular, and other information and communication networks), that enable a civilization to function in a civilized way. Infrastructure is appropriately a Latinate word, given that the Romans were infrastructural geniuses. Their monuments and triumphs, like the Appian Way and the Pont du Gard, are still respected and admired after two millennia. But infrastructure as a common English word has a surprisingly recent etymology, with the present meaning being traced only from 1927, according to my desk dictionary. The word did not even appear in the pre-World War II addenda to the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, considered by many to be the bible of modern American English.