Where everyday words really come from. A taste of what arrives, beautifully printed, every month.
The exclamation mark is the 'cry-out mark,' from the Latin for shouting. For its first few centuries English called it the gentler 'point of admiration,' the mark of wonder, and the famous story about its shape is charming but unproven.
Read →To canvass for votes is to sift them in a cloth. To scrutinise a ballot is to pick through the rags. A quorum is the Latin for 'of whom.' The machinery of voting hides some of the oddest images in the language.
Read →The fruit, comfortably. English named the fruit orange well over a century before it named the colour, and had no word for the colour at all before that, which is why so many orange things are still called red.
Read →The word dance is a young loanword that spread across Europe from medieval French, and nobody is sure where French got it. The languages that did not borrow it disagree about what dancing even is: leaping, whirling, throwing yourself about, or a ring of people.
Read →A nickname has no 'nick' in it. It began as an 'ekename,' an 'also-name,' and it stole its first letter from the word 'an.' The same slip of the tongue that made the word also made real nicknames like Ned and Nell.
Read →A doctor is, literally, a teacher. The word is Latin for 'one who teaches,' and it meant a scholar for centuries before it meant a physician. The academic doctorate is not an imitation of the medical title. It is the original.
Read →Love comes from an ancient root meaning 'to desire,' and it is a cousin of libido and, oddly, of believe. But the real surprise is its company: half our words for love, from fond to passion to infatuated, began as words for foolishness and suffering.
Read →It is coleslaw, from the Dutch for 'cabbage salad,' with no cold in it at all. But the people who say coldslaw are doing something English has done for centuries: quietly reshaping a word that stopped making sense, the same way we got apron, adder, and bridegroom.
Read →Bluetooth is named after a real Viking king, Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson, who united the warring tribes of Denmark. The technology borrowed his name because it united rival devices, and its logo is his initials written in runes.
Read →A candidate is a man in white. A ballot is a little ball. To vote is to make a vow, and to be inaugurated is to have the birds approve of you. The vocabulary of the ballot box is one of the most crowded museums in the language.
Read →Sweltering means dying of heat. The dog days are named after a star. Nonchalant secretly means not getting warm. In the middle of a heatwave, the words we reach for turn out to be far more dramatic than the weather.
Read →A dog says woof in English, wan wan in Japanese, and guau in Spanish, yet it is the same dog. The reason animal sounds change from language to language reveals something surprising, and it is not about the animals at all.
Read →Worship means worth-ship. Bless is rooted in blood. Messiah and Christ are the same word in two languages. The vocabulary of faith is some of the oldest and most travelled in any language, and it is full of buried pictures.
Read →Five is a fist. Eleven means 'one left over.' Zero and cipher are the same word for 'empty.' The names of numbers are the oldest words we have, and they still carry a record of how humans first learned to count.
Read →The turkey is a North American bird that has never lived wild anywhere near Turkey. So why does it carry the country's name? A four-hundred-year comedy of errors, ending with a country that changed its own name partly to get away from the bird.
Read →Toilet, lavatory, bathroom, restroom: we keep inventing gentle words for awkward things, and they keep turning blunt. Linguists call it the euphemism treadmill, and it reveals something honest about how language works.
Read →Pitch, derby, nutmeg, pundit, hooligan: the vocabulary of football is full of buried history, from a Victorian spice-trade swindle to a Sanskrit word for a scholar. A World Cup tour of where the words came from.
Read →Octopi, octopuses, or octopodes? The confident answer is the wrong one: octopus is Greek, not Latin, so the -i ending is a mistake made by trying to sound educated. The plain answer turns out to be the best one.
Read →OK may be the most widely understood word on earth, and almost every confident explanation of it is wrong. The real answer: a bad joke in a Boston newspaper in 1839, which then got lucky twice.
Read →Soccer sounds like the most American word in sport, but England invented it. The origin runs from a Victorian rulebook through a piece of Oxford student slang, and the story is the opposite of what most people think.
Read →Etymology is more than trivia. Knowing where words come from reveals hidden history, sharpens how you read, and guards you against the good stories that turn out to be false. Here is the honest case for it.
Read →Why does discovering where a word comes from feel so good? Because every ordinary word is a fossil, and etymology is the small, endless pleasure of finding the story hidden inside things you say every day.
Read →There is a word for a person who loves words: a logophile. Here are the names for word-lovers, from the ancient philologist to the modern verbivore, and the quiet club they all belong to.
Read →Before it meant attention, focus was the Latin word for the fireplace. The story runs from the Roman hearth, through Kepler's lenses, to whatever your household gathers around now.
Read →In English a gift is a present. In German, Gift means poison. They are the very same word. Here is how one word for giving ended up with two opposite meanings.
Read →Want one in the mail every month?
See the subscription