#The British Bible Society

The period of relative liberalisation under the communist regime in Romania, between 1962 and 1968, enabled the Romanian Orthodox Church to achieve several remarkable milestones: the canonisation of the first seven Romanian saints in 1955, under Patriarch Justinian, and the printing of the Synodal Bible in 1968, in a print run of approximately 200,000 copies, made possible with the support of Queen Elizabeth II and the British Bible Society.

This article analyses the etymology and evolution of the words ‘proroc’ and ‘prooroc’ in Church Romanian, demonstrating that the trisyllabic form arose through a dual false etymology — one popular and the other scholarly — through the contamination of the Church Slavonic ‘proroc’ with the Greek ‘prooratikos’. The two forms coexist legitimately in both ecclesiastical and secular literature, alongside the neologism ‘profet’, which entered the language via Latin and Neo-Latin channels in the 19th century.