for a very long time my alias on the internet had been djinx. there's a story behind that. when i first created my email account at yahoo, my alias was simply my first name. but the law of entropy proved its mightiness pretty sooner than i expected, for the password to my account was soon forgotten(even these days when one has to use more than 20 passwords per day, remembering them can be tedious). for a long time (almost a month or so) i remained in oblivion of my account, and then one day i decided i'll start using yahoo account. by that time i had forgotten even about the email account. naturally, my first preferred alias was my first name. since it was already in use, i couldn't use it(trust me to remember that. even as i type this i'm distracted by the gentle snores of a cat. have you heard that ever before?). those days i didn't have the patience to type in a very long alias(first name+last name combination), as i have these days. so i just typed in djin
('dj' being my nick given by my friends). yep, my alias became djin*. my friend anand then had to promptly remind me what a djinn/djinx means when i made my first post.
etymologically the roots of the word djini/djinni/djinn are from the semitic root "GNN" which means concealed. but most dictionaries give something synonymous to spirit because of the latin word "genius" and the arab word "genie"(an excerpt from the wikipedia about the etymological origins for the word djinn/djinni/djini is given toward the end of the post). eventually i hid behind that alias fulfilling its semitic root meaning. now that i sit back and think about it, i realize i don't really need to be concealed.
Arabia Genie is the usual English translation of the Arabic term jinni, but it is not directly an Anglicized form of the Arabic word, as is commonly thought. The English word comes from French génie, which meant a spirit of any kind, which in turn came from Latin genius, which meant a sort of tutelary or guardian spirit thought to be assigned to each person at birth. The Latin word predates the Arabic word jinni in this context, and may have been introduced in the Arabian civilization through the Nabataeans. The root however, and its concept of being "hidden" or "concealed" still comes from the Semitic root "GNN", which is originally from Paleo-Hebrew, and from which the Greek word Genesis and the Arabic Jannah (garden or paradise) is derived.
Arabic lexicons, such as Taj-il Uroos, and William Lane's lexicon provide the rendered meaning of Jinn not only for spirits, but also for anything concealed through time, status and even physical darkness. A classical Arabic use of the term Jinn is as follows:
وَلا جِنَّ بِالْبَغْضَآءِ وَالنَّظَرِ الشَّزْرِ
And there is no concealment with vehement hatred and the looking with aversion.
English
The first recorded use of the word Genie in English was in 1655 as geny, with the Latin meaning. The French translators of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights later used the word génie as a translation of jinni because it was similar to the Arabic word both in sound and in meaning; this meaning was also picked up in English and has since become dominant. The plural, according to Sir Richard Francis Burton, is Jan.
