Amid the chaos of everyday life, it’s common to mistake one word for another, or to think that two words might be related even though they aren’t. And the way English works, if enough people make the same mistake, it’s not really a mistake any more and ends up memorialized in the dictionary.
“Chaos” is a really old word. It originally meant a chasm, a “yawning abyss” — which makes some sense when you find out that it can be traced back to a Proto-Indo-European root that’s also behind the word “yawn”. In more modern times (that is, only about three millennia ago), the Ancient Greek word “kaos” (χάος) is in the family tree of “chaos”.
In addition to meaning a big empty space, “chaos” can also mean the primordial “space” that existed before the universe was formed (it seems it wasn’t actually space at all, but, well, the theoretical physicists in Ancient Greece had a ways to go). In fact the primordial nature of that original “chaos” was, in Greek mythology, represented by Chaos, who was the oldest of the gods and the parent of Erebus and Nyx, who were themselves darkness and night personified. By the 1500s, “chaos” had come to mean a general state of disorder or confusion. That’s the meaning it retains today. More recently, a branch of mathematics studying apparently random variation arose in the 1970s and is called “chaos theory.”
A word that looks like it might be related to “chaos” is “inchoate.” It’s much less common than “chaos”, so much so that you might not know that it’s pronounced “in-KOH-ate” (but now you do). It’s just a coincidence that “chaos” and “inchoate” look similar; they’re not really related at all. “Inchoate” refers to something at an early stage or just beginning. It comes from the Latin word “incohatus” (to begin), and historically has been used in legal and religious texts more than it’s ever been found in common usage. The root of the Latin word “incohatus” is “cohum”, which is part of a harness used to hitch a horse or ox to a plow — that seems to be the source of the meaning of the word, because the first step at the beginning of a plowing operation would, of course, be to hook your plow behind your trusty team of draft animals.
“Inchoate” dates from the 1500s, but in the early 20th century acquired a second meaning: “disordered, confused, or incoherent” — in other words, “chaotic. And therein lies the connection between the two words “chaos” and “inchoate”. The words had some resemblance, and somewhere around the 1920s somebody mistakenly thought their meanings were related, and that mistake made it into print.
Once it was in print, other people read it and assumed that’s what “inchoate” must mean — after all, it wasn’t a word many people were familiar with. And by the 1993 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the second meaning of “inchoate” was as official as anything gets in English. One thing that probably helped it on its way to being normalized was…well, remember that original mistake in the early 1920s? It was made by none other than Eugene O’Neill in his 1922 play The Hairy Ape: “The room is crowded with men, shouting, cursing, laughing, singing—a confused, inchoate uproar swelling into a sort of unity, a meaning.” If you win the Nobel Prize for literature, you have to be pretty careful with your words. Or…on second thought, though, maybe you don’t!
