The Latin word for shadow is “umbra,” and it shows up a number of places in English. The first place it shows up, although maybe not the first place people nowadays would think of, is the actual English word “umbra.” It’s not necessarily a literal shadow; one usage of “umbra” means ghost — either a ghost of a person or, interestingly enough, an uninvited guest who comes to a party with somebody who IS invited. Our old pal Edward Bulwer-Lytton used it in “Last Days of Pompeii” in 1834: “The sixth banqueter, who was the umbra of Clodius,..muttered also ‘Ædepol’.”
In English, an umbra is also an actual shadow, but a very specific shadow: the shadow of the moon during an eclipse. Technically it’s any shadow created by any eclipse, so the shadow of the earth when it passes between the moon and the sun qualifies too. The central, darkest part of that shadow is a “penumbra” — the “nearly-complete” shadow. “Pen-“ or “pene-“ used to be used in combination with other words to make constructions like “peneperfection” (1810), “penefelonious” (1890), and “peneinfinite” (1647). Also in the 1600s a body of water that was almost surrounded by land — a large ocean bay, for example, with a narrow entrance — was once called a “penelake.”
An umbra is also, somewhat unexpectedly, a fish. It’s also called a “grayling”, and it can be found in rivers in England — at least it was in 1610, according to William Camden’s “Britain:” “Both these rivers are full of Salmons and Trouts, but Wy of the twaine is the better, affording the best kind of them which they call Umbras.”
You can also “take umbrage,” which is being annoyed or offended by something or someone. If it’s someone, then you’d think that in order to “take umbrage,” somebody would have to “give umbrage.” That was once a phrase in common use, but since then we probably decided that since practically everybody was giving umbrage to somebody else all the time, there was no need to refer to it any more. “Umbrage” also used to mean shadow — there’s a line from the poet Shelley referring to “The tall ash and oak, in mingled umbrage, sighed far above their heads.”
Shakespeare used “umbra” to mean the shadow of somebody who’s hiding. That probably led to the figurative meaning of the “shadow of suspicion” — and that’s probably behind the modern meaning of “umbrage,” which has become entirely figurative by now.
But these aren’t the only English manifestations of Latin shadows. There’s also where “umbrella” comes from. It’s a bit of portable shade you can carry with you — at least until, happily umbral (in the shade), you bump somebody with your umbrella and you give — and they take —umbrage.
