pecun

The root pecun goes back to one vivid fact about early Rome: before coins, before banks, wealth walked on four legs. The Latin word pecū (also pecus) meant 'cattle, livestock' — sheep, goats, and especially oxen. A rich man was a man with a big herd. From this came the word pecūnia, literally 'wealth in cattle,' which over time simply meant 'money.' So the entire 'money' family in English is built on a memory of farm animals.

Money in the plain sense. The most direct heir is pecuniary: pecūnia + -ary = 'relating to money.' It is a formal, slightly legal word — you speak of pecuniary gain, a pecuniary interest in a deal, or pecuniary loss in a lawsuit. Add the negative prefix and you get impecunious (im- 'not' + pecūnia 'money' + -ous): having no money at all, broke. An impecunious student or an impecunious artist is one who is chronically short of cash — a more elegant, almost sympathetic word than 'poor.'

The branch that wandered off: peculiar. This is the family's great surprise. Romans had a word pecūlium for the small private property a person was allowed to keep as their very own — originally the few animals or savings a slave or son could call theirs, separate from the master's estate. From pecūlium came the adjective pecūliāris, 'belonging to one person privately, one's own.' That first sense survives in English: a custom peculiar to a region, a problem peculiar to large cities — meaning 'special to it, found only there.' But if something belongs to you alone, it is also unlike everyone else's — distinctive, then odd, then downright strange. So peculiar slid from 'one's own' to 'unusual' to 'weird.' Today both senses live side by side: 'a flavour peculiar to this region' (distinctive) and 'a peculiar smell' (strange).

The dishonest branch: peculate. The same pecūlium that gave us 'peculiar' also gave us peculate, 'to embezzle.' To peculate is to quietly fold public or entrusted funds into your own pecūlium — to treat what belongs to others as your private property. It is a rare, formal word, the cousin of 'embezzle' used mostly of officials misusing public money.

The Germanic cousin: fee. English has its own native echo of this idea. The Old English word feoh meant 'cattle,' then 'property,' then 'money/payment' — and survives as fee. It descends from the same ancient Indo-European root (*peku, 'wealth in livestock') as Latin pecū. So 'fee' and 'pecuniary' are distant relatives that travelled into English by different doors, both carrying the old idea that cattle were cash.

The pattern. Whenever you meet pecu/pecun/pecul, picture a Roman counting his herd. Straight 'money' words keep the -cun- spelling (pecuniary, impecunious); the pecūlium 'private property' words branch into peculiar (what's privately yours → distinctive → strange) and peculate (taking what's not yours into your private store).