If you found yourself composing, say, a morning’s Harkening of the Day back in the late 1600s, you might want to mention Robin Hood. After all, the legend was alive in those days too, and (hard as it is to believe) it was a popular story even before the man himself was played by a cartoon fox. But since you’d want to amaze your audience (who would be listening to the village crier speak aloud instead of reading it themselves, which they very likely couldn’t), you’d describe Robin Hood as both “sagittiferous” and “sagittipotent.” You’d simply be saying that Robin Hood was both equipped with arrows and had very great skill with them.
You might notice that both words have a close kinship with “Sagittarius” the astronomical sign “the archer.” You’d be on to something. All three are based on the Latin word for arrow, “sagitta.” Sagittiferous and sagittipotent appeared about 1650 or so, probably adaptations of Sagittarius, which has been around much longer, since Roman times at least.
Around the 1600s there seems to have been a trend in English to append “-ferous” to various words to mean possession or “has the quality.” “Sceptiferous,” for example, simply meant “having a scepter.” Most of those words (including sagittiferous and, for that matter, sagittipotent) disappeared from use by about the 1850s as people quite sensibly realized that “has arrows” or “has a scepter” meant the same thing and was easier to remember.
There are still a few “-ferous” words in use, but much more common are words that incorporated the essential meaning but in a simplified way. For example, in “transfer,” “refer,” “defer,” “infer,” and even “conifer” (a tree that “has cones”), the “-fer” is from the same root as “-ferous.” I couldn’t find any actual examples of this, but the modern words “inference,” “deference,” and so on might have once had matching versions: “deferous” (which would mean about the same as “deferential”), and so forth.
“Fer” is not always a suffix. You can also find it in the beginning of words like “ferry” and “fertile.” And those, by the way, are much easier to look up in a normal dictionary. This business of alphabetizing only by the first letters in words makes some of these posts a lot more work!
