A couple of thousand years ago, while some Romans were debating in Senate proceedings, others were busily conquering whatever nation they stumbled into, and still others were creating a form of concrete that’s vastly more durable than anything we know how to make today (Roman concrete — no steel reinforcement involved — has withstood seawater for two thousand years and is still getting stronger). Meanwhile, there were also some quiet, calm Romans who took care of the sheep. Being shepherds, they were well acquainted with wool, and of course had a word, “floccus,” for “a tuft of wool.”
“Floccus” turned out to be just about as durable as Roman concrete; it stuck around until the early 1800s when it was adopted into English as “flocculent,” which means (as you’d expect) fleecy, or resembling wool. But then something a little weird happened; the verb “flocculate” showed up in 1845. “Flocculate” means to gather together. Supposedly, I guess, like gathering tufts of wool together, but it quickly shifted to mean gathering tiny pieces of something (anything) together. It was even then a fairly obscure word, but then in 1905 it was adopted by a chemist (which specific chemist is not recorded) in “deflocculate,” which means, basically, dissolving in liquid by breaking down into tiny particles. In a weird reversal, “deflocculate” seems to have been adopted as a term in chemistry before “flocculate,” which was used later in this context: “flocculated particles” — which, as luck would have it, are the suspended particles in a colloid that got there by being DEflocculated.
It’s all very circular, and you may have noticed, has nothing whatsoever to do with wool or sheep. Apparently just a case of words and meanings deflocculating throughout the language.
