With the midterms coming up in the United States, several people are talking about highly competitive gubernatorial elections. A gubernatorial role is that of a governor, so what is up with the guber part in the adjective form? Again, we’ll explore why English makes no sense until we look a bit closer at some word origins that will ultimately confuse us a bit more.
On the surface, it is fairly easy to see why president becomes presidential and why congress becomes congressional. But dear ol’ me, why the heck does governor become gubernatorial? The short answer is French and Latin, the same two influences that muck things up far too often, even if they are of the same cloth.
Governor entered English around 1300 from Old French governeor (in modern French appearing as gouverneur/gouverneure), meaning a person who oversees an area or a specific group of people (Hoad 1996, 198; Harper n.d.-a). However, in the sixteenth century, English scholars were reviving interest in Latin and trying to make English “more perfect” or “purer,” so they started to incorporate classical Latin into English even though English is Germanic, not Latinate (Algeo 2010, 140, 143, 251). These actions introduced many of the oddities we still have peppered throughout English today, including gubernator, the Latin form that gubernatorial would be built on two centuries later (Hoad 1996, 204; Merriam-Webster n.d.; Harper n.d.-b).
The simplest way to put it is that both governor and gubernatorial come from the same Latin word gubernatorem, which means ruler or helmsman (Solodow 2010, 304; Green 2015, 276; Harper n.d.-a). Anyone with a background in Latin can probably see that the sixteenth-century scholars, for the sake of said purity, should have changed governor to gubernator for a male, which would be fitting for Arnold Schwarzenegger, I suppose, but he wasn’t born at the time. The female title would be just as cool, gubernatrix. For our modern ears, both words sound powerful in some mechanical or superhero way, even if they have nothing to do with machines or superheroes, but neither word stuck.
It is important to note that gubernator did enter English in the 1520s, though it remained rare (Harper n.d.-b). Eventually, and without a referendum, American English speakers decided to keep using governor from French for the noun but adopted gubernatorial from Latin as the adjective. Any reason for this inconsistent adoption is up for grabs, but it may be related to register; the adjective appeared in eighteenth-century American English, and the Century Dictionary tagged it as chiefly newspaper use, and the OED marks it as chiefly U.S. (Harper n.d.-b), while the noun stayed in everyday speech. This is supposition on my part, of course. Even if we don’t have solid evidence behind the variance of the two forms, we at least have some etymological background to understand that both words are related even if they sound quite different.
For a bit of extra information, in the late 1800s, it became customary in the UK, especially in shops and businesses, to address a man as guv, which is a respectful, yet casual, title based on a phonetic shortening of guvnor, a casual pronunciation of governor (Harper n.d.-c; Burchfield 1998, 439).
Vivat bonus gubernator.
References
Algeo, John. 2010. The Origins and Development of the English Language. 6th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
Burchfield, R. W., ed. 1998. The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Rev. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Green, Tamara M. 2015. The Greek and Latin Roots of English. 5th ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Harper, Douglas. n.d.-a. “Governor.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.etymonline.com/word/governor.
Harper, Douglas. n.d.-b. “Gubernatorial.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.etymonline.com/word/gubernatorial.
Harper, Douglas. n.d.-c. “Guv.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.etymonline.com/word/guv.
Hoad, T. F., ed. 1996. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Merriam-Webster. n.d. “Gubernatorial.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gubernatorial.
Solodow, Joseph B. 2010. Latin Alive: The Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.