The Etymology of Chandelier
Chandelier reached English in 1736, considerably later than candle, which had entered Old English directly from ecclesiastical Latin around the year 1000. By the early eighteenth century French chandelier had developed beyond a simple candlestick into the ornate, branched, hanging fixture of mirrored crystal that Louis XIV’s glassmakers had made the signature of high baroque interiors. English borrowed the word along with the object. Both chandelier and candle ultimately descend from Latin candēla (candle), itself from candēre, to shine, glow white — the same root that gives candid (white-souled, sincere), incandescent, and the surname Candler. Italian candelabro and Spanish candelabra preserve the older multi-branched candlestick sense without the hanging implication. Today’s chandeliers are almost always electric, but the word still carries its candle-flame imagery, and the most lavish ones — at Versailles, in opera houses — are still designed to mimic the trembling light of a hundred wax tapers in glass and brass.