Prayer is from Proto Indo European prek, which meant “ask” or “entreat”; it is also the ancestor of precarious and postulate. In Latin, prek generated the noun prex, “prayer, request, entreaty”; and the verb precari, “ask earnestly, beg” was derived in turn from that. From precari came the adjective precarius, “obtained by prayer”; and from that came the noun precaria, “thing gotten by prayer”. (Thus, if you prayed for a horse and you got one, you could call it a precaria.) In Old French this became preiere, and it was borrowed into English as prayer by 1300.

Prayer starts with a point-source with great energy (perhaps the emotional state of the one praying), and the energy spreads out and extends from there. The sound “y” indicates a trusting optimism in the result, and the “r” tacked to the end gives more force to that trust. Overall the impression is one of a message sent out with trust, optimism, and great emotional power.

Buddha, the title of Siddhartha Gautama, the 5th century BC founder of Buddhism, means “the one who is awake, aware, knowledgeable, enlightened.” It comes from the Pali verb budh, “to know, to be awake, to percieve”, which ultimately comes from the Proto Indo European root bheudh, “to be aware” or “to make aware”. This root is also the ancestor of bid, forbid (and German verboten), bode (as in “this bodes well”), and ombudsman.

In this connection, this famous dialogue of the Buddha’s is very interesting:

The Buddha passed a man on the road who was struck by the Buddha’s radiant and peaceful presence. The man asked, “What are you? Are you a god?”

“No,” said the Buddha.

“Are you an angel?”

“No.”

“Are you a saint?”

“No.”

“Then what are you?”

“I am awake.”

Notice that since budh means “be awake”, the Buddha simply said, “I am buddha.”

The word Buddha begins with a burst of fast, easygoing energy, which passes through a doorway to reach the Source energy. At least, this is the pronunciation in English. In Pali, Hindi, and other related languages of India, the “dh” indicates an aspirated “d”, i.e. spoken with a puff of air. I don’t know how this changes the meaning of the “d”, but it is phonetically somewhere between the English “t” and “d”, so perhaps it may be thought of as being somewhere between a doorway and a pathway.

The ultimate source of this word is a mystery. I will not go into all the various possibilities and theories here, but the Online Etymology Dictionary has a good survey of them. Old English had a verb wiccian, which meant “to practice witchcraft; to tell the future”, and different theorists have different ideas about where that verb came from. A couple of the most interesting:

• Connected with the Old English word wigle, “divination”, and/or wig, wih, “idol”.
• Descended from Proto Germanic wikkjaz, “necromancer, one who wakes the dead”, related to waken and awake.
• Connected somehow with German wiehan and Gothic weihs, “consecrate, holy”.

In any case, from the verb wiccian came the noun wicca, which meant a “male sorcerer, wizard”. The feminine form of that noun was wicce, and this feminine form descended into Modern English as witch, while wicca fell into disuse and was lost — until it was picked up again by Gerald Gardener’s followers in the mid-twentieth century and adopted as the name of a religion.

The very oldest citations of wicce in context suggest that a wicce was only one of several different kinds of magic users; it appears in lists alongside words that mean herbalist, enchantress, and sorceress, and in other places is used to mean Magi and midwife.

As for wicked, it is derived from witch, and originally meant simply “witch-like”. As witches came to be viewed as evil, “witch-like” gathered bad connotations. Wicked was first used to mean “wonderful” or “cool” in the 1920’s.

The phonosemantics of the wic- element indicate a willful energy that is bound up, contained, perhaps for later release. You can see this also in the noun wick, which is fuel for a candle. In Wicca, the energy is released in such a way that promotes connection with the Source energy. In wicked, the contained energy is channeled towards a choice point of some sort; this may hint at why the word supports such opposite meanings. Witch, however, indicates willful energy that encounters a difficult, challenging resolution.