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pāpako
pāpaka
masc nom sg of pāpaka (adj)
- bad; wicked; evil; wrong; worthless; harmful
- (of speech) rough; harsh; dirty
- leading to; lit. reaching
- what reaches, causes to reach; lit. reaching
Built from
- pāp- — root · fall, ruin, be bad
The concrete image of falling (loss of stability) becomes the moral sense of badness and wrongfulness. Related to Sanskrit pra-√pad- (fall forward into ruin).
- -ka — ending · agent nominal, diminutive
Suffixed to noun and verb roots to form descriptive adjectives. Here it marks the quality or habit of falling/ruin, making 'pāpaka' one who or that which ruins, or is characteristically bad.
Etymology. From √pap- (to fall, to be ruined), with the suffix -ka; the sense of falling and ruin becomes moral and ontological badness. The root √pap- belongs to the same Indo-European family as Latin *cadō (fall) and English *fall* — all tracking the image of collapse into disorder.