We predict that you will guess the correct origins of
retrodict, and chances are we will not contradict you. English speakers had started using
predict by at least the late 16th century; it's a word formed by combining
prae- (meaning "before") and
dicere (meaning "to say"). Since the rough translation of
predict
is "to say before," it's no surprise that when people in the early 20th
century
wanted a word for "predicting" the past, they created it by
combining the prefix for "backward" (
retro-) with the
-dict of
predict. Other
dicere descendants in English include
contradict,
benediction,
dictate,
diction, and
dictionary.
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