Word Facts

There is a great deal of possible ambiguity in English as to the intended meaning of a sentence, especially without other context. An example of this is the sentence, "she paid the man with gold". Although there may be one meaning that you, individually, interpreted first, there are two ways that this could be understood. One way is that 'gold' is the currency with which the man was paid. The other is that the man already had gold when he was paid by the woman; she could have paid him in silver or dollar bills while the gold was just to further describe the man. Because prepositional phrases can be part of a verbal phrase, or also can be separate and modify a noun phrase, there is no way of knowing for sure.

As was discussed Marche 14, 2016, 'cob' in 'cobweb' means spider. The other sense of 'cob' as in 'corn on the cob' relates to roasting animals on a spit. 'Cob' was not the only word that meant 'spider'. In addition to the aforementioned words that meant 'spider', there was an Old English word, 'loppe' which meant 'spider'. The adjectival ending, '-(e)stre' was added, making 'loppestre' in the sense of 'spider-like' giving us the Modern English word, 'lobster'.

Although the American 1920's were an era of decadence, 'decadence' has nothing to do with time. The word comes from the participle of the Latin, 'decadere', meaning 'to fall', first used in English in the 1530's. Emerging at the same time, and from the same Latin root, 'decay', was used, though it 'decadence' is not a derivative of it. Even older, the word 'chance' comes from 'cadere', also meaning 'to fall'.

Have you ever wondered what the f@*k those symbols used to mask curse-words are? Much like the bleep that is used to hide words that are spoken but found to be in some way offensive in their own right, people use symbols that would be able to be easily typed, but wouldn't have to be the standard spelling. The first uses of this were in comics in the early 1900's. There is no purposeful reason that people use the type of symbols they do, or why people often could fill 'shit' as 's&*t' or 's@^t' with no standard, but the characters themselves were chosen by default because typewriters do not have that many options for characters that aren't letters or common punctuation. The name for these sorts of symbols is 'grawlix' coined by Mort Walker in his 1980 book, The Lexicon of Comicana.

English has two clear words for 'morning' and 'tomorrow', but not every language does: not even English at some points in its history. In German, for example, 'morgen' (which gives us the unit of area, 'morgen': the amount of land plowable in a morning supposedly) means 'morning' but also 'tomorrow'. 'Tomorrow' (as was covered briefly in Word Facts July 9, 2015) comes from 'to' and 'morrow', a rarely used word now, but was widespread in Middle English. 'Morrow' comes from 'morn' (the sounds we hear in 'morrow' come from other declensional forms). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, 'morning' also comes from 'morn', but was modified on the same pattern as 'even+ing'.

It is common to find 'appropriate' as the first definition of 'apt' in a dictionary. Despite their similarity in sound and spelling, 'apt' and 'appropriate' are not from the same word. For starters, they have different roots, but also, 'apt' has a meaning that 'appropriate' does not, "quick to learn". As such, 'inappropriate' is the opposite of something suitable: a negated meaning of both words, but 'inept', the opposite of 'quick to learn" negates only the meaning carried by 'apt'. The change from A to E in 'inept' is just due to old conventions before standardization, but it is still a (direct) derivative.

Plenty of words have no logical antonym: a topic that has been covered several times on this blog. When a word does not follow a pattern, usually reassuring affixation, it is possible to create words. The '-er' suffix, for example, can be used to indicate agency, among other things, but the word 'buttle' was made through backformation from 'butler'. Additionally, the prefix, 'dis-' usually has a positive form, but in the case of 'disgruntle', 'gruntle' was only created humorously in the 1920's.

It makes sense that economic systems would be named after what is important within the ideology; 'capitalism' comes from 'capital' which is simple personal financial wealth, and 'communism' is founded around the idea of commonly shared wealth and power. Feudalism, in the way we understand feuds, does not relate to the root in meaning. 'Feudal' comes from the Latin 'feudum', a form which in Medieval Latin gave English 'fee'. Related as well are the words 'fief', both the person and the plot of land, as well as 'feu', a fixed rent. So while such usages like that in Family Feud, may seem distant from a system of localized hierarchical land renting and ownership, the words were in another, separate way, connected.

Somethings may seem essential and timeless, but in fact toilets, meant something very different. Toilet is originally a French word, 'toilette' but with a very different meaning than the word carries today. Though we may now think of them as porcelain, originally, the word meant ‘cloth wrapper’ as a diminutive of 'toile'. 'Toile' as well was adopted into English, first meaning a canvas for artwork, which is derived from the Latin for 'web', but in French meant 'cloth' and usually a cheap one. 'Toilette' in its earliest usage expressed a cloth used to wrap other clothes. Over the years, the meaning of the word changed to "the cover for a dressing table" and "act of dressing". Later still, the word was used to mean "wash oneself". In America, where plenty of its own slang developed, 'toilet' came to mean "a dressing room with washing facilities", which is why, in addition to sensitivity, very

It may have been a shock to discover that gefilte fish are not found swimming in any body of water: it's made from ground whitefish, carp, and pike. The word is from Yiddish , unsurprising since the dish is that of Ashkenazi Jews. Much like how in English, '-ed' suffix is used to make past tense verbs and participles, German and Yiddish generally use a 'ge-' prefix. 'Filte' means 'to stuff' or more cognitively, 'to fill', so in this way, 'gefilte fish' just means 'filled fish'.

To indicate that something is smaller, or less important, many languages have ways of indicating that grammatically. English has the diminutive suffix, '-ish' ( see Word Facts post from July 20, 2016 ), but English also adopts words with the native language's diminutive form. 'Broccoli' is originally an Italian word, and like many Italian words used in English, the singular is rarely used but ends in O. 'Broccolo' means ‘cabbage sprout' in Italian, and is the diminutive of 'brocco' meaning ‘shoot’. 'Broccolini' is a trademark, as it is not natural occurring, but it is an interesting word because the '-ni' acts as a diminutive suffix, so the word has two diminutives attached to it.

When something is important to people, it tends to be incorporated into language even if the meanings do not entirely make sense. 'Respire' means, usually for literary purposes, "to recover hope and strength", but more commonly the word just means 'to breathe'. That word comes from the Latin root, 'spire' meaning 'to breathe', but 'respire' is not the only word in English to derive from it. Some of the words now still relate in some way to breath, such as 'perspire' which in Latin meant 'breathe through'. Plenty of words branched off from the meaning of the different parts that make it up, fairly soon after their creation even. 'Conspire', 'inspire' and 'transpire' all come ultimately from that same Latin root, yet the prefixes mean 'together', 'in' and 'across' respectively, which do not relate to the meanings that the words carry today. 'Spire' on its own however,

Plants are partly responsible for the transition into the first of two major change in human civilization. Planning agriculture allowed people to live in one area, and plan more for the future. The word 'plant' comes from the Old English 'plante' meaning 'seedling'. This is from the Latin 'planta' for ‘sprout' or 'cutting’, and was influenced by 'plantare', a French verb meaning 'fix in a place’. Similarly, the word 'plan' came into English in the late 17th century: from French an earlier word 'plant' meaning ‘ground-plan' and was further influenced by the Italian word 'pianta' which was a ‘plan of building’. Both 'plant' and 'plan' come from the same Latin root.

The phrase 'kith and kin' contains the otherwise rare word 'kith'. The word comes from the Old English, 'cyth' meaning 'knowledge'. A few centuries later, the meaning of the word had changed to 'one's homeland'. Originally, therefore, the phrase meant, the things close to someone: "homeland and family". That notion then led to the third meaning of the word, which we use today, meaning 'friends'.

The prefixes 'hyper-' and 'hypo-' generally can be added to the same words with opposite effect, such as with 'hypothermia' and 'hyperthermia'. 'Hyper-', much like the adjective, 'hyper' (which comes from 'hyperactive) means 'above', and is related through the Indo-European root to 'over' 'Hypo', meaning under, is related surprisingly to the word 'up'. When there is no equivalent, it is not due to grammar but to logic, as a 'hypodermic (needle)' is one that goes 'under the skin'. One could perhaps say that clothing is 'hyperdermic', but it would be odd.

Although there is the term 'present tense', it has multiple forms and different meanings. The present tense can be used to indicate truths that would not change for the past, present or future, such as 'fire produces heat', or 'two times three is four', and this is called the state present. The habitual present indicates events that are continuous or repeating, such as 'I eat breakfast every day. In African American English, this is taken a step further with the habitual 'be', such as in 'she be working' to mean generally that she has a job. The instantaneous present is used to show that an action has just occurred but it is also completed at the time of the speech, such as if a commentator were to say "Jones falls and injures his knee". There are other uses of the present that don't indicate present action at all. The historic present states past actions in the present for emphasis, such as "Booth opened the door, pulled b

There are a lot of ideas that people have about language which are not consistent with the way that people talk, or even write. 'Plural' would often be defined as "more than one"; 0 is less than 1, but it takes the plural, such as in "I have zero dogs". Many ideas like that, or also that sentences have a subject and a verb—when most things people to the Greeks or Romans. Not including the ways that prescriptivism is often to make English appear more as Latin, people think about languages in ways laid out by such people as Aristotle, but those old ideas about Greek are still stuck in the minds of English speaking people. Aristotle also thought that objects roll on the ground because of demons, but that's a different matter.

There are plenty of suffixes in English that turn adjectives into nouns, including commonly '-ness' and '-ity'. Older, Germanic words may occasionally have the '-th' ending, such as how 'wide' turns to 'width', 'warm' turns to 'warmth' and interestingly, 'moon' turned to 'month' because months went by moon-cycle. These endings are a bit rare, and often people won't notice if someone says 'deepness' instead of 'depth'. The quality of being slow, could be 'slowness' as well, but traditionally it is 'sloth'. When Europeans found the animal sloths, remarking upon the slow nature of the animal, names then after their speed. For more information on suffixes, click here .

The rare adjective, 'natant'—similar to the synonym for 'indoor-swimmingpool', 'natatorium' or 'natation' meaning 'swimming skill'—means 'swimming'. The word gets its origins from the Latin 'natant-' of the same meaning. Some people have tried to make a connection to the much more common adjective, 'natal' which comes from the Latin, 'nat-' which means ‘born’. Either way, outside of scientific and or medical usages, the words' Germanic equivalents tend to be much more popular, and far less formal.

Sometimes there is confusion between 'sherbet' or 'sherbert' and 'sorbet'. The word, 'sorbet' came to English in the late 16th century, and as one could likely guess from the name, it comes from French. Via Italian, the word comes from the Turkish word, 'şerbet' which is based on the Arabic 'šariba' meaning ‘to drink’. While we may not think of sorbet as a drink, the word is also related to our word, 'syrup', and although it is adopted from Old French, ultimately is derived from the Arabic, 'šarāb' meaning ‘beverage’. 'Sherbet', or also the common and sometimes accepted misspelling 'sherbert', is different to 'sorbet' in that it milk or egg-whites are added. Nevertheless, 'sherbet' has similar origins to the word 'sorbet', and derives ultimately from the same word, 'šariba'.

A great deal of the nationalities that we know today are vastly different from the native form. This can be seen in the terms, such as 'German' that were adopted from Latin, but to be clear, English has made many of its own as well. For the Anglo-Saxons, no matter where in Scandinavia the Viking raiders came, they were typically referred to as Danes. We see this in the term Danegeld meaning 'Dane gold", which was money paid to Vikings such that they would leave. In addition, Finland in Finnish is 'Suomi'. 'Finnas' was an Old English word for the peoples in northeastern Scandinavia who speak Finno-Ugric languages, such as Estonian or Finnish.

Although for someone with a good eye for these things, words like 'confused' are clearly latinate, as most words with 'con-' or 'com-' are. Nevertheless, just that would not indicate the history and evolution of the meaning of the word, at least not necessarily. In Middle English 'confused meant 'bring to ruin’): ultimately from the Latin past participle of 'confundere' meaning 'to mingle together’. At its start, all of its senses were passive, and therefore appeared only as the past participle, 'confused'; for the active sense, people would use the word 'confound'. Only in the 19th century did confuse gain the active sense, and became far more common than confound .

There are many words now like 'manufacture' 'manual' and 'handle' that derive from 'hand', or the Latin word for 'hand', 'manus'. Those words still manage (also from 'manus') to retain some connotation to hands, however. 'Handsome', on the other hand, does not have the same connotation. It comes from the Middle English ('hand' and 'some') in the sense of 'easy to handle'. This later denoted something that was good or desirable, like a handsome sum or money, or a handsome man like we say today.

People used to talked about doffing and donning articles of clothing with about the same frequency. In the mid-1800's however, the 'don' became significantly more popular, and left doff to the dust as a relatively obscure word. Both of them have originated a pair since the 14th century, from the phrase "to do off" and "to do on". Shakespeare wrote, "what's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet...Romeo, doff thy name; and for that name which is no part of thee, take all myself, which is the first recorded use of the word meaning "to rid oneself of" in a sense that is not clothing.

Sometimes the suffixes and other elements that people learn can have a meaning that is generally true and is easy to understand, but is not always going to be appropriate. '-graphy' in most cases means or has the meaning of 'writing', even in the word 'pornography' which comes from the Greek 'pornographos' meaning ‘writing about prostitutes’, which comes from 'pornē' meaning ‘prostitute’. Likewise, the word 'topography' comes from late Middle English ultimately from the Greek 'topographia' the later form of 'topographein', which is a compound of 'topos' meaning ‘place’ and '-graphien'. Topography, is related to the word 'carve' which comes from Old English 'ceorfan', in that 'carve' is related to the Greek word 'graphein' which had often also denoted carving, as opposed to just writing.

English has no future tense marker, or any other way to (morphologically) alter the form of a verb, opposite to the conjugation in Latin, French, and many other languages. To get around this, English speakers use a range of different constructions. Most often the usage of 'will' or 'shall' would be called the "future tense", but it is not that simple. Generally, there are 6 ways of expressing future-action. The first, like mentioned is with 'will' or 'shall' and a verb in base-form. The next is with "be going to" and a corresponding infinitive verb. Another way is to use phrases such as "be to"," be about to", "have to" etc. In addition to that, the present progressive can be used to emphasize future planned events, but usually only for the near future. Also the simple present tense can be employed for this purpose but more definitely, for example: "he is going to bed at 11pm" versus "he go

Even kids would mostly likely would know what a thesaurus is, but it used to have a more general, all encompassing meaning that was then it was refined. In the late 16th century, English took on the word ultimately from the Greek 'thēsauros' which means ‘storehouse, treasure’, in this case for words. The original meaning was a both a ‘dictionary' or 'encyclopedia’, as both were and are still a storehouse for information. Only was the meaning narrowed to what it is today when Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases was published in 1852, as a model for what we know thesauri to be now.

A lot of the time it is possible to see if words are related by just looking at the similarities in spelling or pronunciation. 'Pedagogue' comes ultimately from the Greek 'paidagōgos' which was a slave who accompanied a child to school. This was already covered on November 8, 2015 , but now it should be noted that 'agōgos' meaning ‘guide’ comes from 'again' meaning 'lead'. 'Synagogue' as well comes the Greek, 'sun-' meaning ‘together’ and 'agein'. Although sometimes a connection in the meaning can be made words ending in '-logue' like 'catalogue' and 'prologue' do not fit into the aforesaid model for the creation of words, as they come from 'logos' which means 'saying'.

Romanian in a Romance language, so it should be no surprise that the name for the region 'Transylvania' comes from Latin, even though it's true that Hungary and then the Ottoman Empire controlled the area for century. The name comes from 'trans' meaning 'across' and 'silvia' which means 'forest', and the suffix '-(n)ia' is a common way to make something a noun which would otherwise, in this case, be a phrase. Once that had been created, words like Pennsylvania could be formed with ease and understanding, even though 'Penn' is not Latin or Latinate, but Welsh in origin.

Greeks call Greece Hellas or the Hellenic Republic, so why do we have a different name for the country than its own? It isn't as though we have no connection to the Greek words, 'Hellenic' is the name for the language family that is comprised of Ancient and Modern Greek, and a 'Hellene' is the name for a person of ancient Greece. The English word, much like many other place names that differ from the native one is from Latin. The Old English word 'Grēcas' was adopted for ‘the Greeks,’ when the Romans invaded, and brought their word, 'Graeci'. The Latin name was used because the Romans in fact referred to themselves as the Hellenes. 'Greek' then comes from 'Graikoi', which was the prehistoric name of the Hellenes according to Aristotle.

Should people need, they could bring any animal or pet into a veterinary practice. As words go 'veterinarian' is rather new, emerging in English only in the late 18th century. The word itself was created from the Latin word 'veterinarius', which comes from the root, 'veterinae' meaning specifically 'cattle' because farm-animals would have been the majority in what was being looked after medically.