SARAH: Doom derives from the latin verb suffix -dere, to set up, and originally meant a law or ordinance.

RALPH: The word later came to mean any official judgement or legal sentence, and that’s how Romeo is using it here.

SARAH: Doomsday is the day of Last Judgment in the Christian Bible, when the earth comes to an end, and God rules on the fate of all humans left.

RALPH: A few years after he wrote Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare was the first writer to use doom in its modern sense, that of ruin and destruction.