It’s out of the ordinary.

This week’s word, I mean. Thanks are due to Pamela Parizo for suggesting it — and for taking the time to read this column. While a tad on the unusual side (it is, after all, a word divided in half by an apostrophe), it’s a classic example of a culinary word, of which there are many examples.

A hors d’oeuvre (or hors d’œuvre, pronounced “or-durv”) is an appetizer typically served before a meal’s main course. It’s also an etymological delight in the sense that it comes to us directly from the French, where it literally means “outside (the) work,” as hors means “outside” and œuvre “(the main) work.” Oh, and the d’ means “of.”

It made its original appearance in English in the early 18th century, functioning as an adverb meaning something that’s “out of the ordinary course of things,” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The first official use in this sense can be found in 1714, in Joseph Addison’s The Spectator, with the line, “The Frenzy of one who is given up for a Lunatick, is a Frenzy hors d’oeuvre … something which is singular in its Kind.”

Addison was a noted English writer, critic and Whig politician — the classic man of letters, notable for, among other things, his tragic political play Cato and, of course, The Spectator, a literary journal that helped make Addison one of the acknowledged masters of English prose and the character sketch.

The meaning of the word shifted very slightly by the end of the century to “something out of the ordinary course,” as exemplified in Horace Walpole’s Letters to Sir Horace Mann in 1783, with the line, “This is a hors d’oeuvre, nor do I know a word of news.”

According to the OED, Walpole was the fourth earl of Orford and the author of The Castle of Otranto, a medieval horror story that popularized romance in then-contemporary fiction. His pseudo-Gothic estate (complete with turrets, cloisters and eccentric collectibles) also helped lead to a revival of Gothic domestic architecture.

But it was his truly prolific letter writing (some 4,000 during the course of his life) that secures Walpole a unique place in the pantheon of English writers. Among his many pen pals was Horace Mann, a British diplomat whom Walpole met just once but with whom he corresponded for nearly half a century. And you thought you e-mailed lots of people.

Finally, hors d’oeuvre’s modern meaning first made its written appearance in Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad in 1742, with the line, “He … try’d all hors d’oeuvre, all liqueurs defin’d, Judicious drank, and greatly-daring din’d.” Pope was a brilliant satirical writer and poet, who, as it turned out, had a long-running dispute with the aforementioned Addison (a very intellectual quarrel over a translation of the The Iliad). But Pope won greater fame through his adroit use of the 10-syllable iambic pentameter rhyming (or heroic) couplet. As related by the Encyclopædia Britannica, he also became the first English poet to be famous in Europe while he was still alive.

So the next time you either eat a hors d’oeuvre or perhaps bring one to a party, recall the towering literary figures who first used the word in English. Please feel free to send me your word ideas, and until next time, cheerio.