Hilary Is Not in the Bible — but the Word Is, in 2 Corinthians 9:7

Hilary is not in the Bible. But the Latin word behind it turns up in Greek in one of Paul’s best-known sentences, and most readers have never noticed. What the name means Hilary comes from the Latin hilaris — cheerful, glad. The same root gives us hilarious, though the English word has travelled a long way from the Latin sense, which was closer to good-humoured than to funny. It was a man’s name for most of its history and shifted…