Unconfirmed Reports

Did you know?

The word identity comes from the Latin denti, meaning “teeth”.

The Romans discovered, through their rituals of cremating the dead, that the teeth were the one part of the body which survived physical obliteration. (Forensic scientists still make use of this fact today, establishing the identity of victims in terrible disasters by collecting and studying teeth.)

Since the teeth were the only thing to survive earthly decay, the Romans concluded that the core of who we are - our spirit, if you will - resided in this calcinate body-part. So the root noun denti was inflected to form identium: the true substance of who you are, your identity.