Q: Why do I see the word “preternatural” all the time, especially in The New York Times? I don’t see it elsewhere. What’s the story? I had to look it up!
A: The adjective “preternatural” (extraordinary, unnatural, supernatural) dates from the late 16th century. It was quite common in the 1700s and 1800s, then gradually fell out of favor. It was relatively rare by the early 1900s, but rebounded somewhat at the end of the 20th century.
A search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books, indicates that the use of “preternatural” began rising in the 1990s. Although the usage appears often in The Times, as both an adjective and an adverb (“preternaturally”), it shows up in many other publications as well.
The term’s first appearance in The Times was in an editorial about the pleasures of journalism, published on March 24, 1860, nine years after the paper’s founding in 1851.
The editorial, entitled “An Oratorical Windfall,” says that despite the occasional weariness of recording commonplace events, journalism can offer “gleams of an almost preternatural absurdity which it is at once a pleasure and a wonder to pursue.”
And this recent use of “preternatural” is from an article in The Times on Dec. 12, 2023, about Shohei Ohtani, a pitcher and designated hitter for the Los Angeles Dodgers and his previous team, the Los Angeles Angels:
“For Angels fans, Ohtani brought more to the ballpark than just his preternatural, comic-book-like talent at swatting home runs and striking out batters.”
Here’s an adverbial example from a Times article on Jan. 2, 2024, about how the American skier Mikaela Shiffrin sees Taylor Swift’s career as a guide for navigating fame and adversity:
“That long-distance tutelage began when the preternaturally gifted Shiffrin, nurtured in the Colorado mountains and at a venerable Vermont ski academy, won three World Cup races and a world championship gold medal as a high school senior.”
As we’ve said, The Times isn’t the only publication to use “preternatural.” Here are a few recent examples from others:
“Martin Scorsese’s career-capping Killers of the Flower Moon likely never would have happened without David Grann, the New Yorker writer with a preternatural knack for unearthing astonishing, dramatic stories from history” (Slate, Oct. 22, 2023).
“Padres Expert Pleads Fans to Not Forget Juan Soto’s Preternatural Talent” (Sports Illustrated, April 29, 2023).
“15 preternatural podcasts to ring in spooky season” (The Boston Globe, Oct. 22, 2021).
As for its etymology, the Oxford English Dictionary says “preternatural” is based on the post-classical Latin praeternaturalis, formed from the classical Latin phrase praeter naturam (beyond or outside nature).
The term first appeared in the early modern English of the late 1500s. The earliest OED citation, which we’ve expanded, is from a letter by the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey to the English poet Edmund Spenser about a 1580 earthquake in the Dover Straits, the narrowest part of the English Channel:
“an Earthquake might as well be supposed a Naturall Motion of the Earth, as a preternaturall, or supernaturall ominous worke of God” (from Three Proper and Witty Familiar Letters, 1580, published anonymously, apparently by Harvey).
A note in Merriam-Webster online about the history of the term says: “unusual things are sometimes considered positive and sometimes negative, and throughout its history preternatural has been used to refer to both exceptionally good things and unnaturally evil ones.”
“In its earliest documented uses in the 1500s, it tended to emphasize the strange, ominous, or foreboding, but by the 1700s, people were using it more benignly to refer to fascinating supernatural (or even heavenly) phenomena. Nowadays, people regularly use it to describe the remarkable abilities of exceptional humans.”
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