pendant

Pendant comes directly from the Old French pendant, the present participle of pendre (to hang), from the Latin pendēre (to hang, to weigh). The word entered English in the fourteenth century. Its meaning is its definition: a pendant is something that hangs. The earliest pendants predate the word by at least 100,000 years — perforated shells and animal teeth strung on cord are among the oldest human ornaments ever found.

The linguistic family of pendēre is enormous. Pending, pendulum, pension, pensive, perpendicular, suspense, depend, impending, appendix, expense — all derive from the same Latin verb. To pend is to hang, and from hanging, Latin derived weighing (a balance hangs), waiting (to be in suspense), and thinking (pensive, literally 'weighing in the mind'). The pendant you wear around your neck shares its root with your pension.

Medieval pendants served functions beyond decoration. Reliquary pendants held fragments of saints' bones. Poison pendants — hollow lockets with compartments — were rumored to be standard equipment for the Borgias. Portrait pendants allowed lovers to carry each other's images. The portrait miniature industry of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries was essentially a pendant industry.

The modern pendant is the simplest piece of jewelry: a chain and an object that hangs from it. Lockets, crosses, birthstone drops, initials — the form accommodates nearly anything small enough to hang. The word has remained perfectly transparent for seven hundred years in English. A pendant hangs. That is all it does, and all it has ever done.