The unexpected turns a word can take between one use and another.
tragedy (n.)
Collection
Words That Changed Shape
A tragedy is a terrible event, and before that it was a kind of play with a sorrowful end. The Greek tragōidia is made of tragos, a goat, and ōidē, a song.1
Why a goat is not known. One explanation looks to satyr plays, whose performers wore goatskins. Another looks to a singer who competed for a goat as a prize. Some doubt the goat altogether.1 Aristotle wrote that tragedy began with the authors of the dithyramb and grew away from the grotesque manner of the satyric form.2
English took the word in the late fourteenth century for a serious story that ends in misery. Chaucer, translating Boethius, defined it as prosperity that ends in wretchedness. By about 1500 a tragedy could be any calamity.1
The fire was a tragedy for the whole street.