sanguine — an adjective meaning optimistic or ruddy of complexion or bloodthirsty or related by blood
sanguíneo — the masculine Spanish cognate of the same meanings
sanguínea — the feminine Spanish cognate
“Sanguine” must have been one of Jane Austen’s favorite adjectives because she used it repeatedly in her works. I recently read Mansfield Park and stumbled upon “sanguine” over and over to describe certain characters’ optimistic outlooks.
“Sanguine” is primarily used in English to signify that someone is “optimistic,” but the word’s origin is a bloody one. In fact, if you look up “sanguine” in a thesaurus, you’ll find words like “bloodthirsty,” “homicidal,” “murderous,” and “bloody.” Those seem a far cry from the word’s more commonly used meaning of “optimistic!”
Hmm, perhaps Jane Austen was describing her characters as bloodthirsty instead! Ha, ha. That would make for a VERY different reading of Mansfield Park.
Like many words we share with Spanish, “sanguine” goes back to the Latin word sanguineus meaning “relating to blood.” So, how did we come to equate blood with optimism? Apparently, back in the Middle Ages, people believed their health and dispositions were controlled by four bodily fluids — blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
Are you grossed out yet?
Anyhoo, if you had too much blood in your system, you had a cheerful, or optimistic, demeanor. Too much phlegm? That meant you were lazy. Excess bile? Depended on the color. Yellow: hot-tempered. Black: gloomy. Like Eeyore.
All that excess blood you were running around with would show up in your complexion and give you a ruddy look, and that made you appear good-humored instead of angry looking for some odd reason.
Knowing “sanguine” and its connection to “blood” comes in handy when learning Spanish because the much more common word of “blood” in Spanish is “sangre.” This could come in handy if you ever end up in the hospital in a Spanish-speaking locale and they need to know your “tipo de sangre.”
Clearly, “blood” and “sangre” are not cognates, but knowing “sangre” will help you learn and recall English words like “sanguine” and words similar to it such as “sanguinary,” “sanguineous,” and “sanguinolent,” which all have to do with “blood.”
“Blood,” by the way, comes directly to us from Old English.
Knowing “sangre” in Spanish can help you remember the word “sangría,” which is an incredibly delicious, sweet red wine that usually has fruit in it. It’s called thus because of its blood-red coloring.
Additionally, you may be familiar with the French word we’ve adopted to mean that someone is cool and calm under strain. That word is “sangfroid,” and it literally means “cold blood” but not in the killer sort of way. It simply means that your blood stays cool under pressure; thus, you have “sangfroid.”
Whether you enjoy reading Jane Austen’s novels or you like to drink different types of wine (or do both at the same time!), knowing a word like “sanguine” and its variety of meanings can help you improve your vocabulary in two languages — more, to be honest, because the words for “blood” in Italian, French, and Portuguese are all cognates of “sangre.”
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Tammy Marshall
Sanguine