Etymology

phatic

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Today it means: Pertaining to words used to convey any kind of social relationship and whose meaning is otherwise either deemphasized or absent. Full definition →

Ancient Greek φατός
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The story

  1. Ancient Greek · derived fromφατός“spoken”
  2. English todayphatic

From Ancient Greek φατός (phatós, “spoken”) - from φημί (phēmí, “I say”) - + -ic. Probably formally influenced by emphatic, which predates this term.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.