The principal meaning of facade is “the front or face of a building,” and it's therefore no surprise that the word is a descendant of the Latin noun facies, which meant “face” or “appearance.” But English wasn't the Latin's immediate heir. Italian was actually the first in line, using the Latin as the basis for the word faccia, which means “face,” and in turn using that as the basis for the noun facciata, which means “the face of a building.” The next beneficiary was French, taking the Italian facciata and keeping its meaning but changing its form to façade. Finally, English became a heritor when it acquired the French word in the mid-seventeenth century, and while this was pretty much a direct transfer, most English speakers today slightly Anglicize the word's form by replacing the ç with a c. By the way, the figurative use of facade in which it means “an often deceptive outward appearance” is relatively new to the English language, having first appeared around the close of the nineteenth century.
©2022 Michael R. Gates
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