Unction

A number of English words are derived from the Latin verb unguĕre, meaning 'to smear [with oil or other fatty substance]'. The commonest in current use is the noun ointment, which is closely related to the verb 'to anoint', which had an archaic form 'to oint'. Anointing has always a sense of importance and of weighty significance: it is a word of ritual, as in the coronation of a monarch, where it indicates divine dedication. As Shakespeare has it:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm off from an anointed king

Richard II III ii 54-5

Some more Latinate words survive, though not much in common use:

• the noun unguent is the same as 'ointment', but where 'ointment' is used in medical terms, 'unguent' is more usual in religious and ritual contexts. (T.S.Eliot uses an adjectival 'unguent' to connote a sense of decadence and the exotic in The Waste Land:

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes

Unguent, powdered, or liquid - troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours;

• Unction is the (usually sacred) substance used to anoint a person in order to invoke God's blessing, power, approval or protection. It is very similar to chrism.
  • Extreme Unction is the term always used in the Roman Catholic church before 1972 for the sacrament now known as anointing of the sick. Extreme here means 'last': the anointing was performed as a final preparation of the believer for death. 'Anointing of the sick' may be regarded as a more optimistic name, as well as reflecting the original biblical justification for it: "Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him" (James 5: 14-15).
• The adjective unctuous means literally 'like unction', 'greasy', 'oily'. It was used to describe rich fatty meat, but this is now obsolete. It is most commonly used figuratively nowadays to describe people of excessive or pretended 'religious' gentleness, kindness or charity: this is the same idea as in the more modern slang expression 'greasy'.
  • Unctious is an older form of the word. It is now regarded as a spelling error. Don't use it!

Etymological note: The Latin unguĕre, with a past participle unctus, degenerated into the French word variously written oinement, oniement, uinement, ungiment, ungnement, uniment, unjment, uignement, ungement, oignement and oingnement. The English settled for the stem 'oint-'