Word Facts

Plenty of place-names now adopted into English came about when the Romans would simply generalize an area with a name that did not match that of the locals, such as with ' Belgium ', though other times this was reversed, such as with the Germanicized ' Switzerland '. The city of York in England was called 'Eboracum' in Latin when the Romans originally settled. The name did not come from out of nowhere, and it is thought that this comes from Common Brythonic, though no one knows the precise language that was spoken in that area at that exact time. The meaning is only reconstructed from similarities between other Celtic languages including the Irish 'iúr', Scottish Gaelic 'iubhar', and Welsh 'efwr' that the meaning in Latin 'land of the yew-tree' is understood. Celtic words for 'yew' also appear in France, such as with the city, 'Ivry le Temple' in the Northern part of the country.

It isn't uncommon to see '-onym' at the end of words that have a meaning associated with names or words. 'Synonym' and 'antonym' may be the most common, but there are others including ' demonym '. There is also the 'retronym' which is quite a new word—only invented in the 1980's—referring to a word that is created from an existing one for the purpose of distinguishing two different meanings that original word has newly acquired. This comes up usually for two reasons, either due to technological advancements or from social changes. With books for example, e-readers that allow people to download books necessitate the differentiation between traditional paper-books and e(lectronic)-books. Another example is when same-sex couples gained marriage-rights, what could have always just been called 'marriage' then was distinguished through other terms like 'straight-marriage' and 'gay-marriage' among other terms. If there ar

It may sound pretty silly that The Grand Teton mountain, part of the Trois Tetons in Wyoming are French for 'big tit' and 'three tits' respectively, but naming places after breasts is more than may seem at first glance on a map. Generally, this is because place-names change over time and gradually shift from whatever the original pronunciations were. The city of Manchester in England was 'Mamucium' in Latin. Many names for English cities were either Latinized from Celtic, or were invented when Romans made settlements in a given area for the first time, such as the city of York which was erected as a fort by the Romans under the name 'Eboracum' (more on this at a later date). Manchester, however, was renamed by the Romans in the first century AD as 'Mamucium' from Celtic meaning 'breast-shaped hill'. Many other places in the U.K. have this 'mam' beginning, including 'Mam Barisdale' in Scotland as well as others. Some brea

Words are only as meaningful as what people associate with them. With 'yacht', for example, it is largely thought of as a purely recreational ship, and likely also associated with the rich. That is, unless you spoke Dutch in the 16th century in which case the word might have a strong association with European pirates. The term, originally in Dutch as 'jaghte' or 'jaghtschip' was a fast boat which the Dutch navy used to chase, or indeed hunt pirates in the Low Countries. The word originates from a word meaning to hunt, spelt 'jagt', 'jaght' or 'jacht'. The German word 'Jäger' meaning 'hunter' is related to this and may be more familiar to English speakers from various aspects of pop-culture. If you're curious about the shift between '-gh-' and '-ch-' you can see more here , though as a loan-word, 'yacht' is something of an exception in English. 

Plenty of words come from given names including ' doll(y) ' as a toy (and a prostitute), 'john' as a man who hires a prostitute, and ' dick ' as a penis. Generally, these words arise because of the commonality of the name and thence an association between whatever the word means the people. Some words derive from given names but come about not because of their frequencies, and instead because of one person in particular associated with it. 'Madeleine' is spelt a number of different ways including 'Madeline', 'Madelyn', however, only the first of these is the term for the little French pastry. The baked good is called such since it is named after the French pastry-cook, Madeleine Paulmier. The variation in spelling would have even existed with the common nickname too, which is usually Maddy or Maddie.

On certain coat of arms there will be lions which represented courage, among other things. Richard I of England, also known as Richard the Lion Heart had three lions on his crest, but if you were to take a time-machine and ask him what they were called, he might call them 'leopards'. The 'leo-' of that last word is the same as 'Leo' the constellation, with that and 'lion' both from the Latin for, you guessed it, 'lion' ultimately from Greek. What's perhaps more interesting is that the '-pard' in the second half of 'leopard' also comes from a Greek word, 'pardos', meaning 'leopard' as we think of them now, but really 'panthers' before the name was given to the American cat. In older writings in English 'pard' would have been normal in the same context as 'leopard' now. For a long period in history, 'lion' and 'leopard' were more or less interchangeable, as some people t

Learning another language can be difficult, but learning one that has similar vocabulary, grammar or another similarity would be easier, so languages like French or Dutch are easier for English speakers to pick up than Arabic or Mandarin . Nevertheless, a word that look similar to another in one language will not necessarily mean the same thing in the other. Generally, these are called "false cognates", and though this generally refers to similar pronunciation or spelling, two words could be cognates irrespective of their apparent relation so long as they derive from the same word. The English word 'forlorn' meaning 'sad, lonely, or abandoned' comes from the Old English 'forloren' when it meant ‘depraved’ as the past participle of 'forlēosan'. While 'forlorn' does not mean the same as the Dutch 'verliezen' or German 'verlieren' which both mean 'lose', they all come from a Germanic origin that in English became

There are plenty of groups of words that are all etymologically related though they do not have similar meanings, much in the same way as with 'budget', 'bulge', and 'belly' . The words 'pouch' and 'pocket' denote similar things and are relatively close in appearance, so it might not be too surprising that they are indeed related. The '-et' that exist in 'pocket' is typical of many other French diminutives that are found in English, though the stem is not 'pock' in this case, but 'poke'. It may be true that most English speakers would associate that word with the act of jabbing, 'poke' does also refer to a small purse in some dialects, you may recognize the word from the phrase "a pig in a poke". While they all come from Old French, the words come from different dialects so while 'poke' and 'pouch were 'poche' in Old Northern French (which would have been 'pouch' in Ol

While a single word does not necessarily demonstrate the way people think, looking to the evolution of words over time can be quite indicative of the way people perceive things. The association between knights and horses, for example, is not exceptionally distant, especially with various modern perceptions about literal knights in armor, however shining. This is not only in stories, nor even chess pieces, but with plenty of words today despite the fact that there are no longer mounted knights. There is, however, cavalry, which is still along the same lines of a soldier riding a horse, the word for which comes ultimately from the Latin, 'caballus' meaning 'horse'. Aside from that, the English derivatives of that word rather shift from the definition of the soldiers, and more of the perceptions of them. 'Cavalier' now as an adjective has fairly negative connotations, but historically it meant the same as 'cavalryman', and especially a gentlemanly one, sort

You might be surprised by the etymological similarities between a fictional doll, frogs, and voting. The word around which they all center is, 'poll'. In the case of the doll, 'golliwog' entered the English language denoting soft dolls, especially with bright clothes and dark faces in the late 1800's after the name of a character in a book by Bertha Upton which is thought to be inspired by 'polliwog' to some extent. The relation to 'poll' here in first half of 'polliwog' is also connected to the term 'tadpole'. Both of those words, and the earlier 'pollywiggle' have the 'poll' which is a dialectal way of saying, 'head'; the '-wiggle' and '-wog' denoted the way that they look like wiggling heads, and 'tad-' was a from the Old English for 'toad'. Finally, voting, or in this case political polling, was a sense of this word that only came about relatively recently in poll's histo

If someone is clumsy she could be described as having two left feet, though someone else nimble or graceful would not be said to have two right feet, at least not commonly and seriously. There are a number of other situations where left- or right-relating words pop up, such as with the adjective 'sinister' meaning 'evil' coming from the Latin for 'left'. For centuries Christians, and other groups, had sinful connotations towards left-handedness which thus giving English that last definition, but one can also see the difference in words like 'ambidextrous' meaning in Latin 'right-handed on both sides (of the body)'. Likewise, 'ambilevous' and 'ambisinistrous'—though fairly rare—mean 'left-handed on both sides', although in this case it denotes clumsiness rather than evil. For more left- and right-words, click here .

Historically names were more indicative of what someone did, or how or where he lived than they are today. Surnames aren't created too often anymore, and now many are dying out quite rapidly, but many people for a long period in history would have had far more personal names than now. Because of this practice, names were quite often just words, or were conventional in some way but were either once words that could have morphed or been abandoned in a modern lexicon, or were words from other languages, often from the Bible. The Scandinavian name 'Bjørn' is somewhat rare for historical forenames as it did and continues to mean 'bear'.  The father of a famous Bjørn, legendary Ragnar Loðbrók (who may or may not have been real) did not inherit his surname from his father, but instead from his pants. There is some debate about where his name really comes, but many people have translated 'Loðbrók' as 'rough pants' since he supposedly wore pants of cow-hide

Poets attend: despite the popular myths suggesting otherwise, and even the post to this blog 333 days ago claiming that there were no words in English to rhyme with 'purple' or 'silver' (and 'orange' and 'month'), there are a few. Though these would likely not be deemed common by anyone aside from perhaps a few old farmers in Scotland, 'curple' refers to the butt (or 'arse' if you're from that region) of anything though especially a horse, and 'chilver' is a ewe-lamb; it is also etymologically related to 'calf'. 'Hirple' as well rhymes with 'purple', and it means to limp. It was not simply a joke at the expense of farmers before, and these quite rare words are considered dialectal used more or less exclusively in Northern England and Scotland. Urban Dictionary lists 'chilver' as "a word used to prove that something rhymes with silver", but each word does have a long history, dating bac

Politically correct movements do not really have the power to change a language in any major way, but often individual words will be dropped for others that are felt to be less offensive. This is, according to Ben O'Neill's antidiscrimination-paradigm , useless in the long-run, but some words deemed more accurate, scientific, or simply less offensive have already replaced various dysphemisms . People tend to use the word ' Inuit ' now instead of ' Eskimo ', but the problem here is that this term is not completely accurate. There are many groups of people with far more subdivisions than this, but in the arctic there are the Inuit, the Yupik, and the Aleut, with distinct languages and cultures. Those in Canada, and Greenland are all Inuit, though of course this can be split up into groups including Kalaallisut, Inuktitut, and Inuvialuk. There are also those on the Aleutian Islands who speak Aleut, as well as those in Alaska and Russian who speak Yupik languages, n

Often dictionaries will simply list words as 'of Germanic origin', even when it says that the word comes from Old English. This is not simply redundant and there happen to be several editorial and etymological reasons. While English is classified as a West Germanic (WG) language, viking invaders who spoke North Germanic (NG) languages heavily influenced the vocabulary of Old, and thence Modern English. While it's a good rule of thumb that most simple, non-technical words one comes across in English will be Germanic, common words like the strong verb 'run' do not necessarily resemble their Modern German (which is WG) counterparts, in this case, 'laufen'. While 'run', deriving from the Old English 'rinnan, irnan' is one of those such words listed as "of Germanic origin", this is not to say that 'run' is separate to other WG words. It is true that 'run' was reinforced by the Old Norse (which is NG) 'rinna, renna

Of the many factors that play into sentence-structure, languages are often classified by how the subject, object, and verb are placed. In English the order is subject-verb-object (SVO) while in Latin it tended to be subject-object-verb (SOV). Given that there are three elements here, there are 6 ways to arrange them, with the two most common being SVO and SOV, and the two least common OSV and OVS in that order. Malagasy spoken on Madagascar is one of the only well-documented languages to have object-subject-verb which is one noticeable indication that it is not related to other languages on mainland Africa. Klingon, the invented language created for Star Trek by Marc Okrand is in OVS which is incredibly rare globally as Okrand wanted his language for aliens to sound as foreign for humans as possible, though of course to someone who doesn't know Klingon this feature would be entirely lost. If you wanted to learn a natural OVS language, you might have to learn Portuguese first bec

American and British (and otherwise non-American spellings) are mostly similar with a few exceptions here and there. In general, when there is a difference it is the case that the American spelling is less similar to an Old French origin for words deriving from this language. The simple reason for this is that the United States gained its independence from Great Britain before universal standardized spelling, and lexicographers, especially Webster, had the chance to come up with new rules. Most of the efforts to change spelling was to make it more closely match the way that people spoke, and while Webster's push for 'tongue' to be spelt 'tung' failed, dropping the U in words like, ' color ', 'honor', and 'behavior caught on eventually. One word that retains its U in American writings is 'glamour', but here, the word was neither from Old French, nor did it enter English much before American independence. The word was adopted in the early 1

When one word has two or more distinctly different meanings, like 'gallimaufry' referring to a jumble of things or a food, there tends to be a historical reason.  The word comes from the two elements 'galer' which was Old French for ‘have fun’, and the Picard (which was the dialect of French that has most influenced English) 'mafrer' meaning ‘eat copious quantities’. While that wasn't very specific, the word which became 'galimafrée' took on the meaning of an unappealing dish. More specific still, the word soon was used to reference a meal of minced meat, especially hash. Much in the way that 'hodgepodge' is used to mean something somewhat carelessly thrown or jumbled together first meant a mutton stew, 'gallimaufry' now has the meaning of a medley of things which was gained from earlier food-related connotations. For more on mixes, click here .

The words 'maybe', 'perhaps', and 'mayhap' can generally be used interchangeably, though some are chosen more frequently than others. Not only do those terms have related meanings, but their formations are all quite similar; the three of them were all originally stated as a phrase in the same way as 'goodbye' began as 'G-d be with you'. 'Maybe' may be the most understandable, as—much like in that clause—'may' is a modal verb and so guarantees that 'be' is not conjugated. Sinc e 'may' in this case will always be followed by 'be', people just joined these together and interpreted the meaning adverbially. With 'perhaps' and 'mayhap', these both happened to come from 'hap' which is not used often at all anymore, but meant 'occur by chance' or more intuitively, 'happen'. 'Perhaps' comes from the meaning of 'per' as 'through' i.e. 'th

There are many words that are created by back-formation such as 'gruntled' from 'disgruntled', but plenty of words exist which have no positive form, such as 'inevitable'. This word was adopted into Middle English from the Latin 'inevitabilis' which is the negative form for 'evitabilis' (‘avoidable’). While 'unavoidable' is a synonym for this, it is not the case that one ultimately comes from Latin and the other from, say, Old English; both 'avoid' and 'inevitable' are Latinate, but 'avoid' came through Old French first. Moreover, 'avoid', originating from the Old French 'evuider', initially meant ‘clear out, get rid of’, relating more to the modern word 'void' (or 'vuide') meaning ‘empty’. This is related to the Latin 'vacare' (‘vacate’), and while in Middle English, 'avoid' could mean to empty something such as a trash it also denoted abandoning something. In

The word 'baby', much like the word, ' mom ' and 'dad' come from imitating the way and infant babbles. In fact, even 'babble' comes from the way babies may repeat 'ba'. This same garble that gave English 'baby' and French 'bébé' also gave Hindi 'babu' and kiSwahili 'baba', the latter two both meaning ' father '. In the same way that people will make words in association to the way simple, basic manner babies speak, there are a great number of phrases that come from the many connotations people have to babies. One of many of these idioms, 'baby blues', refers to blue eyes that babies have, but for a long time this also was a sort of euphemism for postpartum depression.

While 'wander', 'wonder', 'wind' etc are all related through a Germanic root, you will also find in English a slew of words related to the meaning of wander that come from Latin. The words 'error' and the verb 'err', which rhymes with 'her' and it is considered erroneous to be pronounced like 'air', all (including 'erroneous') come from the Latin verb 'errare' meaning 'to make a mistake', but also 'go astray' either from a literal path or perhaps a more philosophical one. The words that were adopted into English tend to relate to mistakes and not meandering, but you might now assume that 'errand' would be related. If you did, then keep in mind that to err is human, and it turns out 'errand' is Germanic and the Old English 'ǣrende' meant 'message' or 'mission'. For more, see 'vagabond'

Plenty of common Western names have some biblical relevance. It is usually from the frequency of these names that terms like 'john' referring to a man who hires prostitute, or foundation the baseball team, Yankees , come about. Some names, such as 'Delilah', are also used as nouns separate from the name, but with connotations stemming from Scripture, and not contemporary connotations. It is from the story of Samson and Delilah where the sense of the word as 'seductress' began, but the name was around for much longer than this. There is disagreement concerning the true etymology of this word, but it either comes from the Hebrew element 'dal' meaning 'weak' or the Hebrew for 'delight'. Unlike other much older names like 'Matthew' or 'John', 'Delilah' only started to be used as a name in the 17th century with the Puritans, though it gained more popularity following Saint-Saens' opera, Samson and Delilah (1877). Li

Much like with capital letters , quotation marks were initially used just to identify what the author felt was particularly important. This mark, which appeared as two lines like || in the margins, could be for anything, not just for quotes. When printing-presses became more common, printers in Central Europe especially started to use curved lines and in the 17th century,the usage of these for quotations became more or less the standard. What was not standard was the appearance of these marks, and this is still the case today. The French, and later Russian, Arabic etc quotation marks: «  » kept the punctuation in the middle, closer to how there were initially hand-written, whereas Germans lowered one and elevated the other: „ “ and kept them pointed inwards. Other countries adopted variations of these such as the Swedish ” ” with both facing the same direction, and the similarly angled „ ” used in parts of Central Europe, not to mention American English's, “ ”. This gets even more

When diminutive suffixes are added to words in English, they tend to be specific to certain words. For instance, a young duck is a 'duckling', a young goose is a 'gosling', but a young cat is a 'kitten', not a 'catling', even though all of those words are of Germanic origins. Some words for animals do not even use suffixes, but employ adjectives like 'cub', though this is equally dependent on individual terms. The term for a young swan, 'cygnet' does not appear so use a diminutive suffix, but certainly does not use an adjective either (unless some people may prefer 'baby swan' for simplicity). While some terms for young animals, as with 'puppy' or 'baby' are completely separate that the word for the mature form, but 'cignet' does have a diminutive suffix after all. The word 'swan' comes from Old English, but the word 'cignet' comes from the Old French 'cigne' ('swan'), so the

When it comes to the aspects that distinguish accents or dialects, any number of subtle differences may be noted, but this tends to boil down to pronunciation, vocabulary, and certain syntactic differences. Someone from New York would not say, 'car' in the same way as someone from London, but this is more obviously a difference in pronunciation of a the same word and not a different word as is the case with 'truck' 'lorry'. In the case of 'car', it is the rhoric-r for the Americans but a non-rhotic-r for the English. It might seem that 'cuss' is just another vocabulary word, distinct from 'curse', but in fact this is due to historically non-rhotic r's employed in the southern United States that eventually got its own spelling. In America, for standards in pronunciation, people tended to use the conventions in the North where there were more people and more money, however this did not happen in the case of 'ass'. In parts of th

Spelling, and pronunciation-rules are nothing more than conventions in order to maintain understandability. This is especially true in English were the sound /a/ in 'father' or 'tot' can be written with an 'a' or an 'o'. It is quite telling then to see a word with that sound spelt with 'aa' in 'aardvark' and one could expect not only would this unlikely be English in origin, but probably wouldn't come from, say, Swedish which uses the character 'å'. The double-a is quite common in certain German orthographies, but more notably perhaps: Dutch. This in fact originates from the Afrikaans—or South African Dutch—words 'aarde' meaning ‘earth’ and 'vark' meaning ‘pig’. Funnily enough, this spelling was kept when it was adopted into English, but now it is spelt 'erdvark' in Afrikaans. English also got the word 'aardwolf' from this same Afrikaans word, but those creatures are more closely related to h

Among the synonyms for 'nonchalant', you would find, 'calm', 'composed' and 'blasé', as well as 'cool'. One cannot, at least not in any standard English way, be 'chalant' because the word was adopted from a French term meaning ‘not being concerned,’ with the 'non-' prefix already added. The stem of that verb is derived from the Latin 'calēre' meaning 'to be warm'. While it may not sound like it, 'lee-' as in 'leeward' meaning the side shielded from wind also is related to this, although that word originates from the Old English, 'hlēo'. Quite often, words for emotional distance or kindness are related to temperature, and even the terms, 'warm', 'cool', and 'cold' are used to describe people's attitudes. It should not be a surprise then that even words borrowed from other languages still follow this same pattern with 'nonchalant' meaning 'not warm'

There is an abundance of terms that feature the word, 'Guinea', including,  'guinea fowl', 'guinea grass', 'guinea worms', 'guinea (coin)', and the countries 'Equatorial Guinea', 'Guinea', and 'Papua New Guinea', not to mention 'guinea pigs'. All but the last two items of that list relate to Africa, specifically the region of West Africa, south of the Senegal River along the Gold Coast. English gets the word from the Portuguese 'Guiné' which refers specifically to the people of the region, but the etymology of this is uncertain. A leading theory, however, is that it comes from Berber 'Genewah' meaning, 'burnt people'. The terms denoting things outside of Africa, may still relate to this region, but only distantly. While 'Papua' is a native word, the latter half of 'Papua New Guinea' comes from 'Nueva Guinea' coined by Yñigo Ortiz de Retez when he thought that these pe

Not all cultures use a base-10 system for mathematics. Some peoples have used 20 as their base for counting, and some have used 12, which is not too hard to believe considering there are separate words for eleven and twelve before getting into the -teens, not to mention that there are twelve inches in a foot and twelve sections on a clock . While that same distinction for 'eleven' and 'twelve' exists in Romance languages, the Romans counted in base-10, as can be seen with Roman numerals, and the word ' digit '. Therefore, when they encountered northern Germanic tribes, they translated what is now 'hundred' as 'centum' (100) without taking into account that the Germanic 'hundred' was equivalent to 120. To avoid this confusion between these hundreds, people now use the term 'long hundred' for the Germanic one. Therefore, when the Icelandic historian, Snorri Sturluson wrote about the size of the peasant army that fought King Olaf