Origins
The word 'obelisk,' meaning a tall, tapering stone pillar with a pyramidal top, entered English in the 1540s from Latin 'obeliscus,' from Greek 'obeliskos' (a small pointed pillar), the diminutive of 'obelos' (a pointed pillar, a spit for roasting, a needle). The word thus contains one of the ancient world's most impressive examples of linguistic irony: the Greeks called the massive Egyptian monuments — some weighing hundreds of tons and standing over 100 feet tall — 'little spits,' as if these colossal structures were merely the kitchen skewers of giants.
The Greek use of the diminutive was probably humorous or deliberately understating. The Greeks first encountered Egyptian obelisks in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, when Greek mercenaries and traders established a permanent presence in Egypt. These travelers, confronting monuments of a scale and antiquity that dwarfed anything in the Greek world, may have deployed the diminutive as a form of cultural self-defense — reducing the overwhelmingly foreign to manageable proportions through the familiar vocabulary of domestic tools.
The Egyptian obelisks that inspired the Greek word were sacred objects associated with the sun god Ra. They were typically carved from single pieces of granite, quarried at Aswan in Upper Egypt, and erected in pairs at the entrances of temples. The pyramidal top (the 'pyramidion') was often plated in electrum, a gold-silver alloy, so that it caught the first rays of the rising sun. The Egyptian name for the obelisk was 'tekhenu,' and the shape was understood to represent a petrified ray of sunlight — a beam of Ra's power made permanent in stone.
Latin Roots
The Romans, who conquered Egypt in 30 BCE, were so fascinated by obelisks that they transported several to Rome. The obelisk that now stands in St. Peter's Square was brought from Egypt by Caligula in 37 CE. Augustus placed two obelisks in Rome; Constantius II added another. This Roman passion for Egyptian obelisks set a precedent that continued into the modern era: the obelisks now standing in Paris (Place de la Concorde), London (Cleopatra's Needle on the Embankment), New York (Central Park), and Istanbul were all removed from Egypt and erected as trophies and curiosities by later empires.
The word 'obelos' also gave English 'obelus' — the typographic dagger symbol (†), used in scholarly and editorial texts to mark dubious or spurious passages, footnotes, or deaths. The connection is that Alexandrian scholars literally 'skewered' suspicious text by marking it with a pointed symbol. The obelus was the sharp point of textual criticism, and its name preserves the same image as the obelisk: a pointed instrument, whether of stone or of ink.
The modern use of 'obelisk' extends to any tall, pointed, tapering monument, including the Washington Monument (completed 1884), the tallest stone structure in the world at 555 feet. This structure, though inspired by Egyptian originals, was built from multiple blocks rather than carved from a single stone — a practical compromise that the Egyptians, who insisted on monolithic purity, would have found insufficient. Yet it bears the name that Greek travelers coined three millennia ago, their affectionately dismissive word for the enormous pointed stones of Egypt: little spits.