rhetoric: [14] In ancient Greece, a rhétōr was a ‘public speaker’, an ‘orator’. The word went back to a prehistoric Indo-European base *wer- ‘speak, say’, which also produced English verb and word. From it was derived the adjective rhētorikós, which passed into English as a noun via Latin rhētorica and Old French rethorique. => verb, word[rhetoric etymology, rhetoric origin, 英语词源]