The term gnome made its first appearance in English in Alexander Pope’s 1714 narrative poem The Rape of the Lock, where it held a similar meaning to its current definition. It originates from a French word with the same spelling and meaning, borrowed in the sixteenth century from the works of the Swiss polymath Paracelsus. Paracelsus used it as a synonym for pygmy, which at that time referred to a mythical race of people in eastern Africa and southern India who could easily move underground. The term gnome doesn’t appear elsewhere, leading to the possibility that Paracelsus invented it. Some suggest it may derive from the Greek word genomos, meaning “earth-dweller”, although this would require the random omission of an e. Another theory is that it could come from an Ancient Greek word or a Greek term meaning “wisdom”, but the Oxford English Dictionary deems this “unlikely”. In all likelihood, this was simply a typographical error.
