spectrum

Meaning

1. neuterappearance, image
2. neuterapparition, specter, phantom
   Iam pridem vagabatur rumor ac fabula per eius loci rusticos, iuxta ponticulum hunc observari spectrum quoddam, cuius subinde exaudirentur miserandi eiulatus: suspicabantur, animam esse cuiuspiam, quae diris cruciatibus torqueretur.1524, Desiderius Erasmus, Exorcismus sive spectrum
3. New Latinneuterspectrum (band of light arranged in order by wavelength)
   Considerabam praeterea quod latitudine foraminis F per quod lux in cubiculum ingreditur fit penumbra in circuitu spectri Y, et penumbra illa permanet in lateribus rectilineis spectrorum PT et pt.Translation by Alan E. Shapiro I further considered that by the breadth of the hole F, through which the light enters the room, a penumbra is made in the border of the spectrum Y, and that penumbra remains in the straight sides of the spectra PT and pt.c. 1687-88, Isaac Newton, Fundamentum Opticae

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Origins

From spec(iō) (“look at, behold”) + -trum (making it a doublet of speculum). The only attestation in Classical antiquity is in a pair of letters between Cicero and Cassius Longinus which imply that the Epicurean Catius (fl. c. 50s–40s BC) used spectrum as a translation of the Greek philosophical term εἴδωλον (eídōlon, “image”). It may therefore have been coined by Catius as a neologism, although alternatively, it could be an undocumented but preexisting word that he repurposed as a technical term. After Cicero, the word is extremely sparsely attested until being revived around the start of the sixteenth century by Renaissance humanist authors with the meaning "apparition" or "phantom", possibly influenced by the fact that Greek εἴδωλον also had this sense. The scientific use to refer to the visible spectrum of colored light was first introduced by Isaac Newton, who used the word in the second half of the seventeenth century in both his English writings and in his first Latin draft of the Opticks, the Fundamentum Opticae, although the 1706 Latin translation of Opticks by Samuel Clarke translates Newton's English spectrum into Latin as imago.

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