I have been several times confused by the word "arete" - because in French (arête) it's a kind of rock formation and has been taken up by the rock climbing community, and in Greek (ἀρετή) it's "excellence."
There's a coffee shop near me, attached to and co-operated by a climbing gear store, called arête. The proximity to the climbing store suggests one interpretation, but it is an excellent coffee shop.
Interestingly, thesaurus.com lists arete as an English word that is a synonym for excellence. But when you look up that word, it gives crag and crest as synonyms.
This is because it's stripping the circumflex accent somewhere. English dictionaries list arête.
According to good old etymonline.com (thank you, Douglas!) the unaccented form exists in English, as well as the separate word of Greek origin:
A similar situation exists with the word parity which has two entirely different meanings: "number of pregnancies" (where the word shares etymology with parent and parentage) or equal status, from Latin paritas.
This ultimately traces back to a homonym in Proto Indo-European:
Αρετή is more than excellence. Philosophers of the time go quite in length about its meaning, its a mix of excellence, honour, good, nobiety(?). I admittedly have hard time finding exact synonyms in english, but the point is that αρετή according to I think Aristoteles (need fact checking) is the ultimate virtue to strive for.
In Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, Pirsig (or perhaps one should say Phaedrus, his former self from before he got electroshock therapy) stumbles upon arete while trying to define quality.
I found his two books very interesting and I had not heard of arete until reading him, even though I had read Homer (in Spanish).
Excellent is a perfectly usable translation, if you extend it to the Bill&Ted interpretation: "be excellent to each other". It's just that excellent tends to be used in a much narrower way in present-day English.
arêter is a common verb in French that means to stop. It is a cognate of to arrest.
The ê before the t is evidence betraying the disappearance of a historic s, which is still present in English cognates:
hôpital -> hospital
forêt -> forest
The word arête means edge, similar to bord.
Not every bord is an arête; only some protruding ridge or sharp edge. It seems to be used for geological ridges, like mountain crests and such, but evidently it can also refer to the blade of a knife or sharp too or such.
French arête in the sense of "ridge" comes from Old French areste and Latin arista "bristle, fishbone", whose etymology is unclear [1] (Etruscan has been sometimes proposed, among other hypotheses), but which is certainly not related to Greek arete.
There's a coffee shop near me, attached to and co-operated by a climbing gear store, called arête. The proximity to the climbing store suggests one interpretation, but it is an excellent coffee shop.