gnome

\ \ [18] Gnome comes via French from Latin gnomus, a word coined by the 16thcentury Swiss physician Paracelsus for a type of being that lives in the earth, in the same way that fish live in water. It seems to have been a pure invention on his part, and is not based on or related to Greek gnómē ‘opinion, judgment’ (source of English gnomic [19] and connected with agnostic, diagnosis, and know).

\ \ The term gnomes of Zürich for ‘Swiss financiers’ is first recorded in the early 1960s.