gnome [M17th] You would not really confuse a gnome with a pygmy, but the terms are closely related. It was probably the Swiss physician and mystic Paracelsus (c.1493–1541) who coined gnome as a synonym of Pygmaeus, the name given to a member of a mythical race of very small people believed to live in parts of Ethiopia and India. Gnomic [E19th], meaning ‘clever but hard to understand’ as in ‘gnomic utterances’, is a different word. It comes from Greek gnōmē ‘thought, judgement’, which was related to gignōskein ‘to *know’, and is found also in gnomon [M16] for the device on a sundial that casts a shadow so that you know the time.