fanum
Latintemple, sacred place, divinely inspired
About This Root
The root fanum is one of those rare cases where a quiet, sacred word ended up describing screaming crowds and burning zeal. In Latin, fānum meant a temple — a consecrated, holy place set apart for a god. It was the calm center of religious life.
The drama begins with a derivative: fānāticus, meaning 'of or belonging to a temple,' and especially 'inspired by the temple.' This was not a compliment about piety. It described the temple servants who fell into ecstatic frenzy during certain rites — people who seemed possessed by the god, raving, trembling, out of their ordinary minds. To be fanaticus was to be in the grip of a divine madness. So even in Latin, the word already carried the charge of excess: not steady devotion, but devotion that has boiled over.
English borrowed this as fanatic, and the religious origin faded while the 'boiled-over' part stayed. A fanatic is now anyone whose enthusiasm has crossed into the extreme and uncritical — a religious fanatic, a fitness fanatic, a political fanatic. The adjective fanatical describes that same blind, excessive intensity, and fanaticism names the condition itself. (The casual word fan, as in a sports fan, is usually traced to this same fanatic — devotion, just dialed down to the friendly, harmless end.)
Now the mirror image. Take the temple, fānum, and put pro- in front, meaning 'before' in the sense of 'outside, in front of.' Profānus literally meant 'in front of the temple' — that is, outside the sacred enclosure, in the ordinary, non-holy ground. So profane came to mean 'not sacred, worldly,' and then 'disrespectful toward what is sacred' — to profane a holy place is to treat it as if it were just common ground. The sacred and the profane are the two halves of the temple's threshold: inside is fānum, outside is pro-fānum. From one holy building, English drew both the language of fevered belief and the language of irreverence.
fanum = temple. A fanatic was once a temple servant raving in divine frenzy — devotion boiled over into madness. Flip it with pro- ('in front of / outside the temple') to get profane: outside the sacred, hence worldly and irreverent.
Core Words Deep Dive
The few words from this family worth telling in full — one by one.
Latin fanaticus first meant a temple servant in a god-sent frenzy — devotion gone to ecstatic excess. English kept the excess, dropped the temple: a fanatic is anyone obsessively, uncritically devoted, from a religious fanatic to a fitness fanatic. The everyday word 'fan' is the same word, tamed.
fanatic + -ism = the condition or mindset of being a fanatic: extreme, irrational, uncompromising devotion to a cause. Almost always negative, used for ideology and belief pushed past reason (religious fanaticism, political fanaticism).
pro- ('in front of / outside') + fanum ('temple') = 'outside the temple,' i.e. not sacred. Hence two senses: secular/worldly (profane literature, as opposed to sacred), and disrespectful to holy things (profane language, to profane a shrine). It is the exact opposite pole of the temple from the fanatic.
Related Roots
sacr- (sacred, holy: sacred, sacrifice) names what is inside the holy boundary; profane (pro- + fanum) names what is outside it. The sacred/profane pair is the classic religious divide between holy and worldly.
Both describe burning devotion. zeal/zealous is intense eagerness, which can be positive; fanatic adds the sense of excess and loss of reason — a fanatic is a zealot who has gone too far.