revolve [LME] The Latin verb volvere had the sense ‘to turn round, roll, tumble’; add re- in front and you get meanings such as ‘turn back, turn round’. This is the basic idea behind revolve and its offshoots: revolution [LME] which only came to mean the overthrow of a government in the early 16th century, and which developed the form rev for the turning over of a motor in the mid 19th century; and revolt [M16th] initially used politically, and developing the sense ‘to make someone turn away in disgust’ in the mid 18th century. The sense ‘roll, tumble’ of volvere developed into vault, both for the sense ‘leap’ [M16th] which came via Old French volter ‘to turn (a horse), gambol’, and for the arch that springs up to form a roof [ME]. The turning sense is found in voluble [ME] initially used to mean ‘turning’, but used for words rolling out of the mouth by the late 16th century, and in volume [LME] originally a rolled scroll rather than a book, but with the sense ‘quantity’ coming from an obsolete meaning ‘size or extent (of a book)’ by the early 16th century. Convoluted [L18th] comes from convolvere ‘rolled together, intertwined’ (the plant convolvulus, from the same root, that climbs by turning its stem around a support already existed as a word in Latin, where it could also mean a caterpillar that rolls itself up in a leaf); while devolve [LME] comes from its opposite devolvere ‘to unroll, roll down’; and involve [LME] from involvere ‘to roll in’.