Word Facts

According to the BBC, the most unpopular word in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia is 'moist', so there is a good chance that many of you don't like the word; nevertheless, it does have an interesting etymology. The word ultimately comes from the Latin 'mucidus' meaning 'moldy', but it was also influenced by the word 'musteus' meaning ‘fresh’, even though those two ideas are not necessarily related. The word is also related to the noun 'must', both as it relates to grape juice and also dampness (but not the frenzied state of certain animals during mating-season). Concerning the former, 'must' meaning "grape juice before or during fermentation" comes from that same Latin word for 'fresh' while the other 'must', or to be more precise, 'musty' is thought to come from an alteration of the word 'moist', also influenced by the grape juice sense of 'must'. Despite that variety of words to whi

Old English would look alien to anyone who speaks Modern English; partly this is because of the inflection—all the verbs were conjugated and all the nouns decline—and also the vocabulary was quite different. As Old English is a dead language however, pronunciation would not always be one of the reasons people may have difficulty learning it, but there were some significant differences. One way in which this differs is that G was pronounced /g/ such as in 'gum' today, but before certain vowels would become closer to /j/ as in 'yum' or 'yellow'. In Beowulf, one of the most famous Old English texts, the hero is Geatish, but while people now usually pronounce that /git/ (approximately 'geet') in Old English it would have been /jaət/ (approximately 'ya-ut').

Every language will have a lot of so called "rules", but so long as someone is understood, exceptions can appear. One feature of English that tends not to be too flexible is that word-order indicated the syntax of the word, so "the man bites the dog" means something different from "the dog bites the man. It is not usually possible to begin with a grammatical object before the verb like it is in languages that indicate this morphologically, such as Latin, but still there are a  few exceptions, such as the colloquial phrase, "what say you?". Another feature is that prepositions are necessary to indicate motion to/from somewhere. If going to a store, or to a city, the word 'to' is necessary for example, but this isn't the case with the word 'home', as that is implied, as in "I'm going home" rather than "I'm going to home". Normally, the only words that do not need 'to' in this case are adverbs like

Everything that it said about the theorized language of Proto-Indo-European is all based on comparing Indo-European languages that are studied now, both living and dead languages. Some linguists have noted a trend in which words meaning 'give' often are related to words meaning 'take' etymologically. Sometimes these words no longer have those meanings and the only reason we know of any relation is from historical documents, but there are also some more obvious ones. The word 'give' for example, is Germanic from a Scandinavian origin and is similar to other words that have the same meaning in Germanic languages, unsurprisingly. It is thought, however, to also be related to the Latin word 'habēre' meaning 'have' or 'hold'.

The most common reason that a language goes extinct is that it is seen as more sensible to teach children a language that is spoken by a large group of people as opposed to a regional language; doing so gives a person, potentially, more options financially. Nevertheless, sometimes people also abandon languages because it is not what is taught in schools, or because they face discrimination for using it. With Bungi for instance—a creole language of mostly Scots English with in fluence from Orcadian Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Cree and Ojibwe—now thought to be extinct, researchers found that the speakers were embarrassed to use it. The accent was noticeably different from Standard English, and they faced discrimination from English speakers, but also they were not intelligible to Cree or Ojibwe speakers. Most of the time, people opted to teach their children Standard English due to those problems, as well as the fact that it was a minority language and was not taught in schools, so not very

The expression "holy cow" is a fairly versatile one denoting surprise and alarm, but it has nothing to do with cows. It does, however, relate to 'holy', in a way, as, much like ' gadzooks ' and other expressions, this was a way that people got around saying certain religious terms like 'G*d' or in this case 'Christ' in vain. Much like most of those other expressions relating to the supernatural in a euphemistic way that are used in English, this is from the Victorian Era, with the first documented use appearing in 1905, though it was likely used earlier in speech.

For those who come across an unfamiliar word, especially those learning a new language, affixes can be quite helpful in figuring out what it means. The suffix '-er', for example, can be added to most verbs to make nouns meaning "agent of [verb]", except with some words like 'over' for which the ending was just coincidental; 'over' is also not a noun, so it wouldn't be an exception to that rule anyway. The suffix '-or' performs a similar function as '-er' in that it denotes so meone who does whatever action was indicated with the verb. A person who creates is a 'creator' and someone who conducts is a 'conductor', but this process does not always go both ways, as a 'doctor' is not someone who 'docts' nor is a 'janitor' someone who janits. Theoretically, both of those aforementioned verbs could exist in English through back-formation, but because they both come from Latin words that look quite di

Many of the words and swears that we use now connoting sex tend to relate more to women than men. This happened in Old English to possibly even greater an extent, as many word that related to promiscuity and seduction as well tended to be feminine grammatically, though the significance of this is debatable. The word 'harlot' today is used as an insult or a somewhat dated synonym to 'prostitute', almost always if not entirely directed at women. This wasn't always the case however, and in Middle English the word denoted a vagabond or lecher, and would be used to refer to a man or a woman. In fact, the word originates from the Old French 'harlot' meaning a '(poor) young man' specifically.

The word 'whore' has been around for over a thousand years at least, while 'ho' is somewhat newer. 'Ho' was not commonly recognized in dictionaries until the 1960's, but people have been using it for centuries; it's estimated that people used 'ho' more than twice as often in the 1860's as they do now. Much like English has two distinct forms for 'curse' and 'cuss', as well as 'arse' and 'ass' which mean the same things but belong to different dialects, 'whore' and 'ho' originally differed based on the accent of the people saying the word, depending on whether the R's are rhotic or not. Now, as 'ho' is considered a slang term that's separate from 'whore', it is used by people who speak Standard American English who would otherwise ordinarily say 'whore; oppositely, speakers of Received Pronunciation in Southern England may say 'whore' with a rhotic R. In Am

Even if people understand how to speak a language, like English, fluently, there is no guarantee that every rule or convention will be followed in certain circumstances. It is indeed quite common for people to misuse 'is' or 'are' depending on if a singular or plural noun or pronoun comes right before it when it the two don't agree, such as the example invented here, "the messages he sent is scandalous" even though 'messages' is plural. Generally these happen in longer, more complicated clauses. People also do this sort of thing quite often putting 'me' at the end of a sentence or clause when it is a subject, and therefore would be 'I'. Much of those two issues arise from people trying to follow convention, rather than simply the grammar; it is after all strange to hear a sentence end with 'I'. It is also due to convention that 'they' takes 'are' as the form of the verb 'to be' when used as a singul

English does not have much conjugation in the same way that some other languages do that add affixes to every verb to indicate the subject thereof. In the present tense , the only conjugation is that 3rd person singular verbs get an S at the end . This is fairly simple when using pronouns and most nouns, but there are a few words where the form of the noun does not agree with the verb, such as 'physics' which is plural in form, but treated as a singular, as in "physics is interesting" rather that "physics are interesting", though both would probably be understandable. In general, the singular form of a verb is used for when discussing exactly one of a countable item, or things that can't be counted, like "milk"; the latter variety can appear as plural when discussing types of something, such as "two fishes" i.e. species of fish. 'Physics' on the other hand is a field made up of different branches, but while the branches are

In English orthography, the letter C can represent the sound /k/ as in 'character' and 'car' but can also represent /s/ as in 'charade', 'Caesar', 'cemetery', or 'cinematograph'. The reason for this is that English spelling is just as much of a blend of conventions from other languages as is the make-up of its vocabulary. In the case of 'Caesar', which is taken directly from Latin as a family-name, the C was originally pronounced /k/ just like the German 'Kaiser'. There will be more on that later. In the case of 'cemetery' and 'cinematograph', the words are originally of Greek origin, a language for which people use a different alphabet. When transcribing Greek now for English-speakers, people will use the letter K, but in the orthography for Latin and French, the languages through which English obtained 'cemetery' and 'cinematograph' respectively, there is no K, so people used C, and over t

English has a lot of suffixes, but most of those haven't changed much in centuries, and rarely are new ones used. Certain lexical classes like nouns, verbs, and adjectives etc. tend to gain the most new words while it is uncommon for new words to be added to others, like conjunctions and articles because they tend to relate to syntax but not the semantics of what someone is trying to communicate. Affixes, though not a part of speech, also are not created often because they tend to be used to communicate something more about syntax as well. The suffix '-(a)holic', however, is not only used to indicate that, for example, a part of speech in the way that '-ness' indicates that a word that was once an adjective is a noun; instead it also relates to the idea of addiction, as in 'workaholic' or 'chocoholic' (though not cat-holic, yet). The suffix was taken from 'alcoholic', even though the only suffix in that word is '-ic' added to 'alc

There are a number of reasons why a pair of etymologically related words might not look similar. One common reason is that at one point a word entered English from another language like Old French, and then perhaps even centuries later another related word was borrowed into English, but by that point some word in either language changed, given that languages do not evolve in the same ways or at the same times. Another common reason might be that the two words are from similar languages, such as Latin or French, but sound and appear different from the same cause as before. Both of these can be used to describe certain derivatives of the Latin verb 'facere' meaning 'to make' or 'to do'. Many of the words we have now as derivatives, like 'effect' or 'counterfeit', came via Old French whereas 'efficient', a word closely related to 'effect', was taken straight from Latin, but was modified somewhat for use in English. 'Factotum'

The nickname 'big apple' as a reference for New York City for a long time had no clear origin, but did have a great amount of folk-etymology surrounding it. More recently, etymologists agree on having found an answer. The first recorded use of the phrase was in 1909 from Edward Martin "Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city… It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap…". Here, and in other instances following this, the association of the city to big apples is thought to be from the idea that things were especially big, both in terms of grandeur but also that there was a lot of money in the area. Though the moniker faded out of use in the 1960's, it was brought back in a tourism-campaign in the 1970's, not to showcase wealth, but to give the impression of cleanliness and brightness to counter the popular image that the city was dirty.

The symbol # goes by a number of names including 'number-sign', and 'pound-sign' on account of its being used to indicate numbers and weights, and 'hash' which is related to 'hatch', the name for artistic shading by drawing a series of intersecting lines. The technical name for this is 'octothorpe' or 'octothorp', but the origins of the name are somewhat uncertain. The combining form 'octo-' means 'eight' in reference to the points around the symbol, but the '-thorpe' is less clear. It is thought to be from the surname 'Thorpe', though no one knows why definitively. Some have speculated that this is from the name of someone who worked at a telephone company, while others believe that there is some relation to the athlete Jim Thorpe. Some have claimed that the second element instead derives from the Old English 'thorp' used in the names of British villages, but this is unlikely the case.

There are plenty of English words with historically French diminutive suffixes that don't necessarily convey things being small anymore, like ' pocket ', though some, like ' cygnet ', still do. Included on that list is also 'budget' and 'ballet, all of which posses '-et' at the end. It can be fun and enlightening to look into other words that have that '-et' as an ending, though technically not a suffix anymore. Another such word is 'jacket' which, like the other words above, does not have an obvious relation to what is left when the historical suffix is removed, in this case 'jack'. Here however, consider that the word is from French, where there is a name like 'Jack' but spelt instead, 'Jacque'. This was not only a name though, but also a nickname the nobility gave to poor people, which also gave English ' jacquerie '. 'Jacket' was a diminutive used to describe short tunics that peasants

Any time you are trying to learn a foreign language, false cognates, i.e. words that look as though they are related but are not, can be quite a nuisance. For English speakers, cognates can make it much easier to understand the words of languages like French or German because there is so much shared vocabulary and similar linguistic history, but some terms, like the German verb 'winken' meaning 'to wave' and not 'to wink' (which would be 'blinzeln') might be confusing. In this case however, 'wink' comes from the Old English 'wincian' which is related to 'winken', and also the English word 'wince'. That word that is not Germanic, and originates from the Old French 'guenchir' (turn aside') and in Middle English meant, 'kick restlessly'. This Romantic connection also extends to the word 'vacillate' which now means to change opinions often, but initially meant just to sway in a physical sense. It wo

To whom will it matter if the word 'whom' stops being used? In Old English and, to a far lesser extent, Middle English, grammatical cases that indicate the syntax of a word with suffixes were used consistently for pretty much all nouns and pronouns, but this eventually disappeared with the exception of some pronouns like 'I' and 'me', or 'he' and 'him'. Native speakers of English can tell the different ways the word 'she' as opposed to 'her' would be used for the most part, even if they could not articulate the precise reasoning as for why; as a sidetone, third-person pronouns are also the only real remnant of grammatical gender as well. In the case of 'whom' however, though it is used to indicate that it is an object of a verb in the same way as 'him' would be, it is not used with the same concern or frequency, and people would be just as likely to understand "who were you talking to" as "wh

In many ways, Middle English spelling was a better indicator of the way in which people actually spoke than Modern English spelling, now standardized. Standards for spelling were only beginning to matter the way they do today, but even by a single author, there was not necessarily consistent spelling-habits. In The Charter of Massachusetts Bay: 1629 (link to the full text here ), what would now be 'minerals' is spelt four different ways: in order of most common to least common 'Myneralls' (5 times), 'Mynerals' (2 times), 'Mineralls' (1 time), and 'Mvneralls' (1 time). Indeed, "and Myneralls...ind Mvneralls" which conceptually the same pair of two words is written two different ways in the same sentence. At this period in English, there had been some significant sound-shifts that had eventually resulted in Early Modern English, but the form of the language was still fairly new and fairly inconsistent for many people. The spelling, howe

Standard English spelling is strange and at times confusing. For every rule such as "I before E except after C unless it says A (/ei/)" there are exceptions, including in this case, 'foreign'. Nevertheless, there are some ways in which English spelling is more simple than English speech. The suffixes '-(e)s' and '-(e)d' are used to represent the majority of plurals for nouns or past tense form of verbs respectively, however it is not pronounced the same always. Indeed, for both, there are three ways in which the same affix will be pronounced for different words. With pluralizing suffix, in 'churches', 'birds', and 'cats', though they all use the same letter, the pronunciation of that ending becomes /ɪz/, /z/, and /s/ respectively. Likewise, with the past tense ending '-ed', in 'biked', 'braved', and 'beloved', it appears as /t/, /d/, and /ɪd/ in speech. Therefore, even though the pronunciation va

It shouldn't come as any surprise that English orography is not only inconsistent but arbitrary. Many people complain about certain things including the amount of silent letters, and the fact that the same combinations of letters will not necessarily represent identical sounds, but the issue is far bigger than that. This problem of arbitrary, or at least somewhat arbitrary spelling exists to some degree within the international phonetic alphabet (IPA). For example, the sound /k/ like in /skɪp/ (skip') is indistinguishable in terms of pronunciation from a /g/ in that word. This is not the case for every instance when a /k/ would appear, such as /kɪʔən/ ('kitten'), but in general, when preceded by an /s/, there is no reason except for convention that the word could not be spelt with a /g/ as in 'sgip'. This is also true of the /t/ in 'stop' which could just as well be a /d/, and the /p/ in 'spring' which could be a /b/.

In English, for the most part, different parts of speech are fairly distinct. It is possible to have one word that belongs to multiple lexical classes, e.g. 'water' in "one waters plants with water" is a verb and noun respectively, but alternatively various derivational suffixes can work to modify a word in a way that changes the part of speech to which it belongs. The suffix '-er', among its many other uses, can be added to most transitive verbs, i.e. ones that take direct objects, to become a noun indicating that someone performs said action. In this way, "she walks (dogs)" can become "the walker (of dogs)". There are a few exceptions however, such as "he knows many facts" would likely not become "the knower (of many facts)". It is not impossible to have that sentence, and it would probably be understandable to most people, but this would sound odd.

Places in New York, all over the state and especially in New York City, gained a lot of names the Dutch. Sometimes this was from originally Dutch words like ' Staten (Island)' coming from the word for 'States', while others came from people's names, such as the origin of the Bronx . The word 'knickerbockers' is quite prominent, and has been applied to all New Yorkers, exclusively Dutch settlers of New York and their descendants, the underwear more commonly called 'knickers', a New York sports team, and is the name of several buildings and streets. You might think that this was from some Dutch family perhaps, but actually it was from the pen name, Diedrich Knickerbocker, (actually W. Irving) who wrote "A History of New York". The only connection to the Dutch is that 'knickers' is thought to have originated from an association with the Dutchmen's breeches in the illustration in the book.

In terms of its vocabulary, English is something of a hodgepodge with large percentages coming from different languages, notably Latin, French, and Greek . It is for that reason that the prefix 'a-', which is used in four different ways, can come from four different languages. First, it can be added to words, usually adjectives, to mean 'not', such as 'atypical'; this comes from Greek. In other words such as 'asleep' or 'afoot' the prefix can be replaced fairly seamlessly with the preposition 'in' or 'on', and indeed this form of 'a-' derives from the Old English 'on'. The word ' aloft ' has a similar prefix, but it is ultimately Old Norse, and only found as part of a few words specifically. Third, it can mean 'utterly'  such as with 'abash', deriving from the Old French 'es-' with the same meaning. Finally, 'a-' is sometimes found as a form of the Latin 'ad' meaning

For all grammar Nazi's, or any other grammatically far-right leaning prescriptivists, it may be quite vexatious to hear people say 'espresso' as /εkspɹ‎εso/ (like 'express-o'), which likely started from some phonological association with 'express'. This happens often enough to the point that to almost any native speaker of English it should be understandable, especially in context. All languages change in this way; variants arise, and after enough time and with general understandability, they become normal and acceptable. Indeed, even with this variation of 'espresso', people often will even spell it as 'expresso', though in formal contexts this should be avoided. As a bonus for those who dislike the way in which 'espresso' is used, the term 'espresso-bean' doesn't mean anything different from 'coffee-bean'; 'espresso' only refers to the preparation of coffee, literally 'pressed' in Italian.

Plenty of words from various trades end up making their way into day-to-day speech. 'Aloft', which now can refer to anything raised up, was originally a sailing-term denoting the top have a ship. That and the word 'loft' both come from an Old Norse word 'lopt' meaning 'air'; derivatives appear in other places, in fact in German the airfare is called the 'luftwaffe' and 'balloon' is 'luftballoon'. 'Aloof' as well was once a nautical terms that originally meant "the direction of the wind " but now used almost exclusively relates to people, and probably cats. 'Alow', however, is one nautical term that did not enter casual speech, but it still refers to the lower half of a ship, and is also related to the word 'lie'.

The word 'peregrinate' meaning 'to wander ' as well as the word 'peregrine (falcon)' both come from the same root; unsurprising perhaps since they look and sound so similar. The two terms entered Middle English directly from the Latin 'peregrinus' meaning foreign, traveling', ultimately from the elements 'per-' ('through') and 'ager' (field). For 'peregrine' this name was not given to the free wanderings of the bird, or else a lot more might have had this name, but instead because unlike many other birds captured in the nest when very young, peregrine falcons were captured while flying. Nevertheless, for a very long time this word tended to denote foreignness just as much as traveling, which led to the word 'pilgrim' in English as well, though via Provençal first.

The adverb 'widdershins' mostly is used now as a synonym for 'counterclockwise'; this term has had that meaning for a few centuries, but earlier definitions included "in the opposite direction" (not just of a clock or circle) and plainly 'wrong' or ' bad '. Unlike with many other derivatives, the modern sense is in some ways closer to the original meaning, in this case from the Middle High German 'widersinnes', meaning 'against' ('wider') and 'direction ('sin') or 'travel' when the element appeared as 'sinnen'. The Middle High German 'sin' is also related to the Scots 'sin' meaning 'sun', and as it happens, 'widdershins' was often used to denote, among those other things, movement in the opposite direction as the Sun goes across the sky. The word ' sinister ' also relates to the direction left historically, as well as things that are morally bad: a fairl

In English, there are the terms 'estate' and 'real estate' that both relate to property, though we don't necessarily think of the two as needing to be distinguished from each other now since the contexts in which they are used tend to be different. Moreover, the 'real' would seem an unlikely retronym in this case as the other 'estate' is not fake nor abstract. Nevertheless, 'real estate' was used for the purposes of differentiation: immovable property as opposed to personal. Other uses of 'real' in this way also include the slang phrase 'get real', and 'real time' referring to the period of time when an action takes place, not when it had been recorded.

When most or all of a languages' syntax is derived from affixation, individual words tend to get longer, which is why Mandarin words, which structurally posses little built-in syntactic meaning individually tend to be shorter than others like in Hungarian . Not all word-length can be attributed to grammar though, as compounding affects this too. While in English we say ' bus-stop ', this is more typical of Germanic languages than Romance ones, so in French people say 'arrêt de bus' (stop of [the] bus). Likewise in Estonian—a language related to Finnish  and Hungarian—not only is it agglutinative  such that syntactic meaning is built-in with many affixes, but is is common to form words from compounds rather than creating a new word, making them even longer. For example, 'ebajumalakummardamine' is the Estonian word for 'idol-worshiping'—which is also a compound in English, to be fair—literally meaning 'non-God-worshiping'.