Word Facts

'Business' is spelt nothing like it sounds in a manner that is strange even by English standards. It is for that reason that unlike other adjectives ending in Y that take the '-ness' suffix like 'happiness' or 'craziness' for which the terminal Y gets rewritten as an I, 'busyness' keeps its Y from 'busy' as a way to disambiguate itself from 'business'. If to you it feels like 'busyness' should also be written as 'business', know that it was for a very long time. In Old English the word was 'bisignis', or what would today just be 'busy' and '-ness', though the need for the suffix to make it into a noun in this case is rather odd as there was already the Old English noun 'bisig'. The original sense of this 'business' in Old English was 'anxiety' and '(state of being) busy' which was kept in Middle English and Early Modern English, but eventually the senses of be

The verb, to espouse, something means to support a belief, while the noun, spouse, is a married partner to someone. If today, one wanted to express that noun as a verb, there are plenty of ways to say that, including, 'wed' or 'engaged' or others depending on the situation, so there isn't much need for a new way to express this, but historically, 'espouse' was synonymous with 'marry'. That word originated as a participle from the Latin verb 'spondere' meaning 'betroth', and even when 'espouse' meant 'wed', it tended be be found as 'be espoused to', just like it would have been translated from Latin. Though of the pair, only 'spouse' kept its association with marriage , 'wed' has gained the sense of being attached to an idea separate from marriage, similar to 'espouse'.

Last week on Word Facts you might have learned that ' glob ' comes from a combination of 'blob' and 'gob', though this is not where the story ends. 'Blob', which was generally synonymous with 'bubble' and has quite a similar form to many other words that denote droplets of water or another liquid, including 'blotch' 'and 'botch', whose origins are unknown, and 'plop' which is imitative, as well as 'blot' from Old Norse. Many of these words, just like 'glob' itself are blends of other words; 'blotch' is thought to be at least partially a blend of 'blot' and 'botch'. All of these seem to follow the pattern of bubbles of liquid, which is reasonable for this list, so it may be surprising that 'blubber' denoting fat, not water, would be on this list as well. As it happens however, 'blubber' initially denoted sea-foam and other bubbles on the water, and not just animal

The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word for 'nose' is thought to have been ' snu ' which led to the derivation of many other words relating to noses such as 'snout', 'snot', and more nouns, It also led to the creation of certain verbs we have today like 'sneeze'. 'Snivel', which is more often found as the adjective 'sniveling', comes from the Old English 'snyflung' as a verbal noun from 'snofl' meaning ‘mucus’, though it has only been recorded as a verbal noun. The word nowadays doesn't relate to noses, at least not directly, but the related word 'snuffle' certainly does. Having so many of these other related words helps to influence the formation of more, as was the case with 'snuffle' which was first found in the 16th century but is also related to 'snuff', as in tobacco found about a century later. Not off of the 'sn-' words that relate to noses can be attributed to PIE however, as

This is the 900th Word Facts, if you were keeping a record; thank you for all the likes, comments, and shares. The subject today, 're-', has a few different uses explored on this blog, including its function to express intensive force which you may remember from, ' remember ', and to refer back to something such as with 'refer' coming from Latin meaning 'bring back'. With the word 'record', before technological means to document things, could mean "repeat to commit to memory". The word has a Latinate verbal prefix , but now the word when accented differently can be a noun , this sense came about later. By that time, the word already connoted written documents and laws, but originally what has now become a 'record' was oral, and meant in the English translation of Latin, in essence, "back to the heart" ('re- cord'), not terribly dissimilar to the expression, "remember something by heart", as was the or

In many countries people write numbers using Arabic numerals, though these are poorly named as they come from India, and in the Middle East today very few of their numerals look the same; e.g. 2, 3, and 4 appear as ٢,٣, and ٤ respectively. There are many more systems of writing numbers out there, but in the West there tend to only be two used commonly, including the Arabic numerals of course, and Roman numerals. The latter use letters—I, V, X, L, C, D, and M—to express numbers, similar to many other systems. The Greek numerals, though less common than their Roman counterpart today, also use alphabetical letters to represent numbers. Some on the Roman system was somewhat arbitrary, such as V and L for fifty when the Latin word for both starts with a Q, but Greek numerals represented 1-10 with the first ten letters  of their alphabet, and 20-90 (going up by tens) is represented by the 11th through 18th letter, and hundreds are represented by the 19th through 27th letter (including the

Combining forms  are a good way to indicate relation between two areas. This appears in terms of conflicts, such that the Austro-Sardinian War, but also to denote regions, such as the Austro-asiatic language-family. The problem with this is that the aforementioned war, also called the the Franco-Austrian War took place between the Austrian Empire and the French and Sardinians, whereas Austro-Asiatic languages are spoken in Southeast Asia, and does not relate to Austria at all. In this case, the name 'Austria' and the name 'Australia' both come from the Latin ' australis ' meaning 'south'. The Austro-Asiatic language family also does not relate to Australia, but they are found in the south of Asia.

People should endeavor to be frank with each other, even if they aren't named Franklin. Interestingly, the name and the adjective share the same root, though this is not to say that people named Franklin have been associated with honesty, in the same way that 'dick' denoting a penis derived from the frequency of people named Dick . While today Franklin might not mean anything more than the name, in the days of Feudal societies the term referred to a landowner who was free but wasn't noble, ultimately coming from 'francus' meaning ‘free’. This is the same origin as 'frank', but it is was used far before these land-owners; the Germanic tribe, the Franks were the only group to have full freedom in Frankish Gaul. The name for this tribe is from the Old English 'franca' meaning ‘javelin’, similar to the root for ' Saxon ' but was also reinforced by the Latin 'francus'. As mentioned in the post yesterday , modern day France composed the

There are plenty of misleading city-names, like Strasbourg  discussed here yesterday, that have the appearance of being part of from one country, or linguistic region, but for whatever reason are not. This happens with towns and cities on national borders more often, but they do not have to be, like with 'Kluczbork' (in German 'Kreuzburg') in south-central Poland. This is true also of the City of Frankfurt am Main. Though many German immigrants settled in the Midwest in the United States leading to different spelling 'Frankfort' in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, the word comes from the days of being in the Frankish empire, which consisted of most of modern-day France, much of southeast Germany, and elsewhere. The latter half of the name is of Germanic origin, related to the English 'ford' meaning a shallow part of a river.

If you look on a map of the United States you would see a lot of cities named after other places that already exist. There is, for example, St. Petersburg in Florida, Berlin  in three different states, and a few Cairos and Delhis as well. With the exception of some names derived from indigenous American tribes, such as Miami  and Tallahassee in Florida, there is not too much linguistic reasoning. In other places, there can be a few clues, such as with Brčko, which based off of the lack of many vowels and the inverted circumflex over the C, one might guess this is in Eastern Europe; it is in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Places ending with ' -burg ' or variations thereof tend to be in Germanic-speaking regions, but 'Strasbourg' is a city in France, and not only has the Germanic ending, but also the 'Stras-' is a cognate with the German 'Straße' ('street'). It would be easy to mistake this for a German city, not helped by the fact that there is an cen

Either for fun or for research, it can lend a new perspective on words to look into the relation between ones you suspect may share a common ancestry. If you stumble upon the words 'conglobate', 'conglobulate', and 'globulate' (outside of this post) then you might be reading some very odd, old things, but you may notice the similarities. The words are certainly rare, and they all relate to joining things together, especially into a ball, so it wouldn't be crazy to assume they are indeed related. Unsurprisingly then, it turns out that they are, as well as a few other, generally astronomical , geological, or biological  terms like 'globular', from the Latin 'globulus' meaning 'sphere', as well as the more commonly found 'globe'. 'Glob' is not among these related words as, though visually, semantically, and maybe even phonologically it may appear similar, it is thought to come from a blend of the words 'blob' and

So long as someone is proficient enough in a given language, even without needing to read any grammar-books that speaker would have an understanding of how to form new words from existing patterns. 'Yiddish' is an adjective, and nominally is the name of a language; like many others that have those same qualities such as 'Swedish', 'Finnish', and 'Danish', to form the demonym , one simply has to remove the suffix, '- ish '. Neverhtless, while 'Swede', 'Finn', and 'Dane' are all fine to use—common enough and not offensive—'Yid', created by back-formation , is considered informal and often offensive, though it should be noted that 'Jew' is perfectly accetable. By the same pattern, someone who is Amish could be thought of as an Am, but this is not used by any or at least many people seriously.

English has a large amount of vocabulary that comes from French at one time or another. This could be from Old French , adopted up to a millennium ago, or this could come more recently from Modern French . It might not be surprising to learn that many of the words used in Old French are not the same as those used today, but even newer words that are used in English are sometimes not used in French. The word 'double-entendre', for example, comes from a French word 'entendre' meaning 'listen', now taken to mean 'understand', though in fact this is a corruption of the French phrase 'à double entente', a word you might recognize from the Triple Entente or Entente Cordiale: alliances during WWI. The problem here is that if one were to say 'double entendre' to a speaker of Modern French (assuming that person is not also relying on English) it would not mean anything, and effectively go from denoting a double-meaning to zero-meaning. Instead

Suffixes  are pretty common in English and even more in other languages but what is and is not a suffix can be more difficult to determine than at first glance. If they are considered to be morphemes attached to words in order to form a derivative but that don't have meaning on their own, like '- en ' which has the power to make words into verbs, adjectives, nouns, and more, this covers most of what makes up a suffix, but leaves room for some confusion and argument. For example, some words have endings that just naturally formed to have certain letter-combinations, so while likely no one would say the '-er' suffix in 'teacher' or 'toaster' is the same as in 'over', with other words like 'mountain', 'fountain', 'obtain' and others it may seem more confusing, since they all have the same ending, and if you know Latin you may even recognize they come from the same word, 'tenere' meaning 'to hold'. This

Doomsday machines, or doomsday devices are ideas that were popularized in the 1950's during the cold war, when the concept of a machine that could wipe out all, or most, of humanity was at least theoretically conceivable, and the terms have been used in science fiction a great deal since. The actual term 'doomsday', or 'Domesday' goes back all the way to Old English however, with the words 'dōmes' and 'dæg', when the word that eventually became 'doom' meant 'judgement' or 'put in place'. Originally, this referred to Judgement Day, which in Christianity was the day at the end of the world when humanity would be Judged by God. Eventually, this 'Domesday', which is still used, turned into 'doomsday', such as with the 'Doomsday Book ' (also found as 'Domesday Book') which laid out the record of ownership of land, and other things, in England in 1086. Soon after, in the 12th century, the sense of tha

While it is not possible to know the etymology of all words without doing some research beforehand, generally if one knows to look for various signs it is reasonable to make some guesses. For example, if a word begins with a silent letter like M in 'mnemonic' or P in ' pterodactyl ' it would be fair to guess that it comes from Greek (and they both do here), because those sounds are possible in Greek but would not be in the beginning of natively English words. Other words that have silent beginnings like with 'chthonic' and 'chthonian' have fairly common suffixes as far as English vocabulary is concerned, but the initial CH which is not pronounced. These words mean 'relating to the underworld' and come from the Greek 'khthōn' meaning ‘earth’. Not all words that come from or are related to Greek ones have to have these sort of spellings, as is the case with 'humble' which is from the Latin 'humus' for ‘ground’, and is aki

If you talk about a panel today, it would mean a thin board of something, perhaps metal or wood, or a group of people assembled to discuss something in particular. When the word was adopted into English from Old French, the word meant ‘piece of cloth’, going back to the Latin, 'pannus' which also meant ‘cloth’. Initially, this took on the meaning of ‘piece of parchment’ on which people would write. From here, it eventually gained the meaning of ‘list’ which then had the sense of ‘advisory group’. The other sense today of section of thin metal, wood, or even comic strips comes from the connotation to framing on the older meaning of panel, and soon enough this gained the sense of a thin surface-material that we have today. This is not the only time that a word for 'cloth' has taken on another meaning, as this also happened with ' toilet '.

Like ' logistics ' which originally was associated with buildings, the word 'lobby' originally denoted cloisters, coming from the Latin, 'lobium' meaning ‘covered walk’. For a while, this is all that the word meant, as it still would when referring to lobbies in buildings today. Later on however, the sense of 'lobby' as a verb meaning 'influence political official on an issue' arose from the practice of visiting the lobbies of the places where legislature was written in order to influence the members. The German 'Laube' is related, but the sense of somewhere covered here denotes trees and not man-made structures.

A significant amount of words, including a number of fairly recent ones, have come from initially being only used in the military, such as ' beleaguer '. The word 'logistics' now can refer to pretty much anything relating to coordinating people or things irrespective of purpose, but originally the word had the sense of 'conveying troops and equipment'. The word is also related to 'lodge' as something logistic (or in French, 'logistique') would have related to housing people and supplies. The word was adopted in the 19th century, and eventually took on a more domestic meaning.

There are a number of combining forms for the names of countries that function like prefixes, such as the 'Anglo-' in 'Anglo-Dutch', but English has a limited number of these. They almost always have '-o-' at the end that can replace other suffixes with the exception perhaps of 'Amer-' for American and a few others. For instance, the '-ian' in 'Indian' or '-ean' in 'European', which are quite common among the adjectival form for the names of places, are replaced with '-o-' in 'Indo-Australian plate'. At other times, such as with 'Hiberno-' for 'Irish', these forms are also historical, with this one originating from the Latin 'Hibernia'. Though there are some conventional limitations, like not having combining forms for countries beginning with 'The' nor countries with multiple-word names, there is really no set way that this is done. Luckily for people who don't want

For various reasons, especially concerning wars and other conflicts, people adopt an us-versus-them perspective that makes its way into language to some extent. Occasionally these situations result in adopting words from one language into another when these two groups are now in close contact who wouldn't be otherwise, as with ' gung-ho ', but often a slew of derogatory terms arise in order to refer to a group of people mockingly and negatively. In WWI, the Germans were often called ' huns ', or 'krauts' which also was used during WWII. While those would probably still be considered offensive, 'jerrycan' comes from a WWII-era slang-term for 'German', as originally the well-crafted fuel-cans were a German invention that was eventually reverse-engineered by the British and later used to replace their more flimsy, awkwardly shaped ones. The name, and with it a possible connotation to Germans stuck.

The idea of suffrage today would almost certainly bring up idea of one's right to vote. For a long time in the history of French and English however, this word denoted praying for another person, or "intercessory prayers", attributed to the Latin root, 'suffragium' meaning 'support', or a 'vote'. The  second element to this is debated but either it meant 'to shout', or 'to break'.  At first glance, the latter theory might not seem as reasonable, but keep in mind that voting in Greece was based on broken shell and pottery, giving English ' ostracize ' , so it would be relevant in this case. Either way, the origins of this word go back millennia, but the sense of 'suffrage' as 'right to vote' was first found only in 1787, in the United States Constitution.

The Old English word for making something into a coil has given Modern English an array of different words, but none of them relate to cords or coils exactly. The Old English 'wrīthan' meant 'plait' or 'to tie something with cord' which lead to the verb 'writhe', and the related 'wrath' (noun) and 'wroth' (adjective). Not all the derivatives have meanings connoting hatred however. That is, unless you are filled with rage at certain floral arrangements, as 'wreath' is also related. The verb 'wreathe' also associated with these, but this was created much later, partially from back-formation of the no longer used, 'wrethen' which was a participle that meant, 'made into a wreath'. The letter E at the end after the TH of a noun is typical of many verbs formed this way, such as 'bath/bathe', 'breath/breathe', and you might have also noticed it with 'writhe'. If you know any other rela

There are some prescriptive grammatical rules, such as the idea that in English it is not right to end a sentence with a preposition, but following those does not make a language any more or less understandable. Other rules, which may be though of as conventions instead, are based only retrospectively on the way that people already speak, and tend to be told for the use of people learning a second language, as a native speaker would probably not need to think about it. A native English speaker, for example, would likely not need to be told the difference between 'on' and 'onto', and just use them without thinking twice. It is even less important to describe this convention because the words can be used interchangeably in many sentences. 'Onto', however, is chosen to show motion towards whereas 'on' describes a motion in the same spot, so in 'he jumped onto the box' we could assume that beforehand the subject was not on the box, whereas with '

There are many ways to change the part of speech of words in English using derivational suffixes, but this tends to depend on the individual word, and for it, there are standard endings. While there may be multiple ways that people say the nominal form of 'deep', either as ' depth ' or sometimes 'deepness', this is largely from not knowing some of the more obscure suffixes. 'Candor' is another word that sometimes is found instead with the '-ness', as in 'candidness', though arguably those two nouns carry different connotations. This is also not the only example of an adjective with '-id' that has a nominal form with '-or', as there is also 'splendid' or 'horrid' but there are not too many of these, so not knowing this would be fairly understandable. This is especially true since there are some adjectives like 'torrid' and 'putrid' that do not become 'torror' and 'putror' a

Though you may be found dumb when your dumbfounded, relationship between those words is not quite as simple as that. This word does come from the element, 'dumb' but the second part comes from a different 'found'. While the more common way to find 'found' is when it means 'to come upon' or 'discover', it also means 'to mix', and since it isn't just a participle , it can appear as 'she founds' in the present tense. This may be more familiar to people in other forms, such as 'foundry' where metal is cast. In that case, the metal is physically mixed , but this also has taken on the same meaning as 'mixed up', i.e. 'confused'. Unsurprisingly perhaps, both 'confound' and 'confuse' which each relate to mental states, come from the same root as 'dumbfound'. 'Confuse' was not always synonymous with 'confound though, and for a while had the sense of causing upheaval in a ru

People who are brought up in cultures that use numberless languages such as the Manduruku in Amazonia have a comparatively more difficult time observing and recalling quantities greater than even three. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which in its strong form tries to explain that one's native language determines the way one thinks and is able to interpret the world, these anumeric languages would merely be an example that not having numbers such as 'one' 'two' 'three', and instead using words equivalent to 'some' or 'many' results in that speaker's inability to comprehend these concepts. While it may seem reasonable on the surface, the issue is not simply linguistic in its nature. For anyone, regardless of one's first language, learning to count numbers requires a great deal of time and energy and aside from recognizing two quantities as different in size, almost nothing is innate about numbers which can take years to compre

George II was said to have 'died at stool' which was the manner in which Elvis' death on the toilet may have been recounted had it also happened in 1760. This was not even the only way that nobility used the word 'stool' with  to some association to "using the bathroom", but at this time, 'stool' would have referred not to the actual waste as it does today, but the toilet, much like the many other words used today including, 'John', 'can', and 'ivory throne'. The euphemism , 'stool', in this case was took on its meaning of 'toilet' in the 18th century, long after the word was used to mean a seat just as it is nowadays, and etymologically it is even related to the word 'stand'. After it was used as a synonym for toilet, even as part of the title of the man who wiped the King, Groom of the Stool, eventually took on the meaning of ' poo ' rather than 'toilet', and is used still employed n

Alphabets and other writing-systems should have some way to write anything, theoretically. The issue is that some sounds are not present in all languages, and other phonological rules  make certain languages either impossible or impractical to write in certain alphabets. While certain letters may represent different sounds in different languages, English, for example, has around only one sound produced at the back of the throat whereas Arabic can have up to seven, and some languages in the Caucasus can have more than twenty. This makes it very difficult to represent these sounds not present in English with the Latin alphabet that we use, and indeed there are separate Azerbaijani and Georgian scripts. Oppositely, languages like Greenlandic or Hawaiian necessitate that a vowel must follow a consonant, so the words become really long with lots of syllable s. For Cree, which has this same problem when the Latin alphabet is applied, a new syllabary was a invented that makes writing a lo

'Phobia' in general refers to an extreme aversion or fear of something, but what makes someone phobic as opposed to merely afraid comes down to the cause of this feeling. If the fear is irrational, then it can be called a phobia, so while there's 'claustrophobia' meaning 'fear of cramped places', and 'hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia' which is the fear of long words, there is no 'murderer-phobia', so to speak (it could otherwise perhaps be 'dolofoniaphobia') because murderers are reasonably feared. Some phobias, like 'arachnophobia' (fear of spiders) or 'cynophobia' (fear of dogs) have some logic to them, but someone truly phobic would not need logical or experiential reasoning. With that being said, 'homophobia', first appearing in the 1960's, and 'transphobia', first appearing in the 1990's, are, thought of this way, legitimate phobias in that they do describe an irrational and acute avers