conflagration

Conflagration is the Latin end of a three-step ladder: fire is native English, flame came from French, and conflagration came from Latin. All three mean roughly the same event, and English kept all three because they do different social work — the short native word for the thing itself, the French word for something more elevated, and the long Latin word for the formal or catastrophic version.

The Latin is conflagrare, "to burn up," from an intensive com- plus flagrare, "to burn, blaze, glow," which comes from a root meaning "to shine, flash, burn" that also underlies flame, flagrant and, more distantly, black and blank. English took the word in the 1550s for a destructive fire, and by the 1650s for a large one specifically. Nobody uses it about a candle, which is exactly the point of having three words.

conflagration
(n.)
1550s, "a destructive fire;" 1650s, "a large fire, the burning of a large mass of combustibles," from French
conflagration
(16c.) or directly from Latin
conflagrationem
(nominative
conflagratio
), noun of action from past-participle stem of
conflagrare
"to burn up," from assimilated form of
com-
, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see
con-
), +
flagrare
"to burn, blaze, glow" (from PIE root
*bhel-
(1)  "to shine, flash, burn").
also from 1550s

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