Why Is There a Latin Word for ‘Helicopter’?

Latin stopped being anyone’s native language over a thousand years ago, yet somewhere in a Vatican dictionary is a word for “helicopter” — helicopterum. At first glance, this seems like an anachronism. Helicopters weren’t even invented until the 20th century, many centuries after Latin fell out of regular use. So how did a language associated with togas and gladiators end up with a term for a modern rotor-powered aircraft? The answer lies in one of the more unusual side projects of the Catholic Church: the ongoing effort to keep Latin functioning as a living language.

It’s been centuries since any country spoke Latin as an everyday language, but it never actually disappeared. While Latin began to die out in the sixth century, not long after the fall of Rome in 476 CE, it remained the working language of scholarship, law, and science well into the early modern period, and it’s still the official language of the Vatican and the Catholic Church. Indeed, papal documents, church law, and official Vatican communications are drafted in Latin even now. (Italian serves as the everyday working language of the Vatican.)

Today, Latin is considered a dormant language rather than an extinct language. An extinct language is entirely gone and no longer written, with no living speakers and no active cultural usage. Extinction is the complete and final end of a language’s existence. A dormant or dead language, on the other hand, offers some hope. Dormant languages such as Latin survive in written form, they are taught and learned, and people still speak them. They may be called dead, but that’s something of a misnomer — in some cases, including Latin, these languages are very much alive. 

The fact that Latin is still taught and studied — and, albeit quite rarely, spoken — created a practical problem. How do you write about airplanes, telephones, the internet, or space travel in a language that predates all of them? The Vatican came up with a solution. 

Starting in 1992, a team of Vatican scholars under the Latinitas Foundation began publishing the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis, a dictionary specifically designed to fill in these gaps. The reference work translates both English and Italian terms, building them out of existing Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes, the same way the Romans themselves once expanded their own vocabulary. The project has grown to include roughly 18,000 entries across 450 pages, covering everything from lampshades (umbráculum lámpadis) to computers (instrumentum computatórium). 

Coining a Latin word for “helicopter” was perhaps easier than some others, because it was already based on words from classical antiquity. The word was created in 1861 by a French inventor using two Greek roots: helix, meaning “spiral” or “coil,” and pteron, meaning “wing” (the same pteron found in “pterodactyl,” or “winged finger”). 

Since Latin freely absorbed Greek vocabulary throughout its history, adapting those same roots into a Latin noun was a natural fit, producing helicopterum. The coinage and its potential usage weren’t just theoretical, either. The Vatican scholars tasked with creating the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis may well have felt a degree of satisfaction knowing that the Vatican City Heliport could finally be referred to using a Latin term that combined new translations for two modern words: aëriportus helicopterorum.

The Latinization of “helicopter” is far from an isolated case. The same Vatican dictionary includes Latin coinages for all manner of modern actions, events, and inventions, from jogging (cursus pedester) to fog lights (pharus adversus nebulam) and traffic jams (fluxus interclusio). In most cases, these words were built using the same method of combining classical roots to form new compounds. 

Together, they reflect the broader philosophy bound up in the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis. Rather than letting Latin become a purely historical language, confined to inscriptions and old manuscripts, its custodians have chosen to help it adapt and evolve to depict the modern world, one carefully constructed word at a time.