Vocabulary Shout-Out: Paul Farhi of "The Washington Post" for "Epochal"

In The Washington Post's own coverage of the sale of the paper to Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, reporter Paul Farhi used epochal to describe the change digital technology is bringing to newspapers. 

For much of the past decade, The Post has been unable to escape the financial turmoil that has engulfed newspapers and other “legacy” media organizations. The rise of the Internet and the epochal change from print to digital technology have created a massive wave of competition for traditional news companies, scattering readers and advertisers across a radically altered news and information landscape and triggering mergers, bankruptcies and consolidation among the owners of print and broadcasting properties.

At first glance, epochal seems like a word whose meaning is easy to decode. It's the adjectival form of epoch, right?

Not exactly. According to The Online Etymology Dictionary, the word epoch, meaning "a period of time," began appearing in English around 1620, as a mutation of the Latin epocha, which means the "point marking the start of a new period in time." Think: the birth of Christ, the fall of Rome, the day you got your driver's license. 

Epochal began appearing in English not long after, in the 1680s, and its meaning, "marking the beginning of a new development or era," more closely relates to its Latin forebear. Epochal describes not epochs, but epocha, events that are "epoch-making." Fahri's use was spot on.