Estiércol, the Spanish word for ‘fertilizer,’ traces back to Latin stercus, with stem stercor-, which meant ‘dung, excrement,’ and also, based on the use to which that was put, ‘fertilizer.’ The ancient Romans created gods for lots of things, and one of those deities was Stercutus, the god of manuring. He seems to have been more important than you might have expected because he was also known as Sterculus and Sterculinus.
While Latin stercus left the ground of common English vocabulary infertile, it did lead to some fancy technical words in English. One keeps us in the realm of the gods: In Christian theology, stercoranism is ‘the belief that the consecrated Eucharistic elements, the bread and wine, are subject to decay and pass through the body like other ingested things.’
In the sciences, we have stercolith, ‘a hard mass of fecal matter.” Stercoraceous means ‘relating to, being, or containing feces.’ Botanists created a plant family called Sterculiaceae, a name chosen because of the smell given off by some of the plants in that family. Will it spoil your enjoyment to learn that chocolate is in that family? Oh well, you can mask any unpleasantness by telling people that the kind of chocolate you’re offering them is sterculiaceous and letting it go at that.
© 2018 Steven Schwartzman
Spanish-English Word Connections 
Aug 25, 2018 @ 07:16:41
Not a common word. I am curious what led you to it.
Aug 25, 2018 @ 08:00:07
I’ve known the Spanish word estiércol for half a century, having learned it in Honduras. What prompted this post was that I recently came across the name of the plant family Sterculiaceae, which looked enough like estiércol that I investigated the etymology of the words.
Aug 25, 2018 @ 11:04:57
Funny how our brains hold onto certain things that can be a trigger years later.
Aug 25, 2018 @ 11:15:17
True—even if estiércol isn’t something we’d want to hold on to, at least not physically.
Aug 29, 2018 @ 19:55:53
Stercoranism is brand new to me. I’ve never heard the word. It must come from Roman Catholic theology. My hunch is that it’s tied up with the doctrine of transubstantiation, but Luther threw that baby out with a whole lot of bathwater and a few snippy remarks about Aristotelian ‘pseudophilosophy.’
Anyway: it’s an interesting word. A friend has a friend whose husband was in India a few months ago, consulting with the people at Sterlite, a copper smelting business that’s part of a metals and mining comglomerate. It looks to me as though the protests against Sterlite might have turned stercoraceous.
Aug 29, 2018 @ 22:16:17
Yes, stercoranism must have originated in pre-Protestant Christianity in relation to transsubstantiation. Whether stercoranism was confined to the Roman Catholic Church or also found in the Eastern Orthodox Church, I don’t know.
You’d not heard of that word, and I’d not heard of Sterlite and the protests against its copper smelter in Tuticorin, India. The company’s name reminded me immediately of “Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight….”