The prefix di- comes from Greek and means “two” or “double,” appearing in words like divide and dioxide.
That’s obvious (duh), but what the heck is a lemma? Sounds like a bean or wooly-haired critter or something. Well, from Greek again, lemma means “a proposition or choice.”
Thus, “di-lemma” literally means “two propositions” or “two choices,” referring to a situation in which one is forced to pick between two usually equal options.
Men will sometimes have trilemmas, like when we have to choose between fishing here, fishing there, or fishing over yonder. And this makes me wonder… would people start using trivide if we ever learned to trisect an arbitrary angle? Hmm… I’ve got to do some digging on divide vs. bisect now.
P.S. A lemma is also the base form of a word, the version you’d find in a dictionary, such as run for ran or running. Which has nothing to do with dilemma that I can see, so we’ll ignore that tidbit.
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