hospitable

Latin hospes named something that modern English has split into two separate ideas: the person who gives shelter and the person who receives it. A hospes was simultaneously a host and a guest, a host-friend bound to another by the ancient obligations of mutual protection. The Romans inherited this concept from a Proto-Indo-European root, ghosti-s, which named the stranger who was owed protection precisely because he was a stranger.

The adjective hospitalis, derived from hospes, meant of or relating to a guest. Medieval Latin hospitals were originally places for pilgrims and travelers, not the ill. French adapted the Latin term during the medieval period, and English borrowed the adjective form in the late 16th century. Religious reformers of that era were debating what obligations the wealthy owed to travelers after the dissolution of the monasteries had emptied England's roads of shelter.

Shakespeare, writing in the early 17th century, deployed the word in contexts where the duty of great men to shelter strangers was still felt as a moral obligation rather than a social preference. Protestant pamphleteers of the same era argued that monastic hospitality had been the social safety net of medieval England. What had been a divine duty was becoming a personality trait.

The semantic drift continued through the 18th and 19th centuries. Hospitable lost its legal and religious urgency and became a descriptor of manner: a hospitable person was pleasant, welcoming, easy to be around. The word has shed most of its original weight in modern English, where it describes a characteristic rather than a binding ethical code.