Medieval

Does it ever annoy you how so many people are still spelling it "mid-evil" like you did in fifth grade? Sure, you know how to spell it, but why does everyone misspell, and what the heck does it mean? Was everybody back then really evil? Well, I was flipping through some vocab recently and stumbled across the word coeval, which means "occurring at the same time." Of course, I said to myself, "co-" means "with", so I guess "evum" must mean "time" (it's actually aevum in Latin). Then it hit me that the word was probably related to the words event (actually unrelated, but hey, nice try) and, yes, medieval. So basically, coeval is pronounced co-ee-val. So what must have happened was that medieval used to be pronounced me-dee-ee-val, and the two "ee"s just assimilated into one sound (the dictionary actually had both pronunciations). So "medi-" means "middle," which would make medieval mean, no, not "evil times," but rather befittingly, "middle ages."

Duh.