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Object the noun [14] and object the verb [15] have diverged considerably over the centuries, but they come from the same ultimate source: Latin obicere. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix ob- ‘towards’ and jacere ‘throw’ (source of English ejaculate, inject, subject, etc), and hence originally meant literally ‘throw towards’, but by classical times it had been extended metaphorically to ‘place a hindrance in the way of, oppose’. This was the strand of the word’s meaning taken up by English in the verb object, and also originally in the noun (‘how Christ answered to objects [that is, objections] of false Jews’, John Wycliffe 1380). The standard present-day meaning of the noun, however, comes from a post-classical meaning of Latin objectum (the noun formed from the past participle of obicere): ‘something put in someone’s way so that it can be seen’, hence a ‘visible object’.
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