If you were out and about around the 1770s and you encountered someone with a high-pitched, shrill voice, you might remark to a companion that there, forsooth, was a fellow afflicted with oxyphony.
“Oxyphony” is a compound word made up of “oxy”, which means sharp or acidic, and “phone,” which means tone or sound. The word fell out of use sometime in the 1800s so completely that you won’t even find it in most modern dictionaries. But there’s still something interesting about it, or at least about its composition. “Oxy” is used as a part of quite a few compound words, but nowadays most of those are coined in chemistry, where the “oxy” stands in not for “sharp” but for oxygen — new oxygenated compounds are generally named “oxy-“ something, as in “oxyacetylene,” “oxycontin,” “oxybarbituate,” and so on.
But “oxygen” itself is a compound word too! The “oxy” in “oxygen” is from Greek, and means, right back to where we started, “sharp” or “acidic.”
You can find “oxy,” still meaning “sharp”, in some other words where the derivation isn’t as clear. For instance, “oxymoron” is a self-contradictory phrase — the most common examples are “jumbo shrimp” or “military intelligence.” So what does “sharp” have to do with that? It’s hidden in the origin of the second part of the word, “moron.” “Moron” is also from Greek, and while “oxy” means “sharp,” “moron” means dull. So “oxymoron” represents an example of the kind of phrase it’s used to describe; etymologically, it simply means “sharp-dull,” no matter whether you croon it in mellifluous tones or screech it in a fit of oxyphony.
