stamina [L17th] Stamina first came into English in the sense ‘the essential qualities of something’, but had acquired the modern sense of ‘staying power’ by 1726. In Latin stamina is the plural of stamen, the word for ‘the warp of a loom’, hence ‘a thread’. Stamina could also mean the thread supposedly spun by the Fates that dictated the length of your life. Thus your stamina is a combination of an image of the quality of the cloth you are made of and what the fates have dictated for you. The singular stamen [M17th] came into English initially in the same meanings, warp of textile or thread spun by the Fates, but the Roman author Pliny had used stamen for the thread-like, pollen-bearing parts of a flower and this was readopted in the late 17th century. The other reproductive organ of a flower is the stigma [L16th], which came into English via Latin from Greek stigma ‘mark made by a pointed instrument, brand’ from stig- the root of stizein ‘to prick’. These go back to the same Indo-European root as to *stick. Stigma first came into English in the sense of a brand, then for a mark of disgrace [E17th]. The sense ‘the part of a flower that receives the pollen’ is mid 18th century. In this sense the plural is usually stigmas, but the Latin plural is stigmata, used for marks resembling the wounds on the crucified body of Christ since the mid 17th century.