Word Of The Issue: Another Trip Around The Sun

The Grapevine’s guide to sounding Icelandic, one word at a time

If you’re reading this hot off the press, then we’re about to reach the summer solstice on June 21. In our last issue, we tackled what makes the Icelandic summer uniquely difficult, beautiful, manic, delirious… check that out here. But here in Word Of The Issue, we’re keeping those good summer vibes going!

Let’s talk about the sun. If you’ve passed an establishment like Hagkaup or read an advertisement for a taxi company, you might have come across the phrase “opið allan sólarhringinn.” Sólarhringur (in the previous phrase it is declined to sólarhring, with the masculine definite article –inn) is a compound of sólar, from sól, which is sun, plus hringur, which is circle or ring. Together, sólarhringur is 24 hours, one day. If a store is opið allan sólarhringinn, that means it is open all 24 hours of the day, like Hagkaup or 10/11 or… end of list.

In a similar vein, you’ve got sólarhringsvakt. A 24-hour watch, which is a term that might crop up most frequently when the Icelandic Meteorological Office is keeping its eyes on a potential eruption site.

However, if you think about this critically, sólarhringur does not exactly have a “modern science” sound. One pre-teen from Mosfellsbær submitted a question to the Icelandic Web of Science last year, asking why sólarhringur is not actually the word for a year, and why this word meaning “sun-ring” is not actually “earth-ring” if it’s about what happens in a day.

After complimenting the student’s question for validity, the editor of the site replied with a twofold point. First, many phrases in Icelandic, or any other language, are not technically correct — check out other Word Of The Issue iterations for proof. Second, if we are trying to be perfectly accurate, the Icelandic word for one day should be sólarsporbaugur með hringvikið 0,017.

That doesn’t roll as well off the tongue, so I say we stick with sólarhringur.

Learn more Icelandic words hér.