I'm delighted to announce the impending arrival of my third etymology book, Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds, featuring quirky, charming, and humorous word origin stories for lovers of all things lexical. This lovely little blue book, published by Hachette's John Murray Press, will be released in hardcover on Oct. 7 in the… Continue reading Useless Etymology (the Book!) Hits Shelves Oct. 7
The following is excerpted and abbreviated from the book Words from Hell: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology. English is a great language for verbal evisceration, a practice predicated upon a long history of creativity in this arena. Poetry, theater, novels, and, of course, politics have made rich, recurring and visionary use of put-downs,… Continue reading Insulting Etymology + Savage Insults from History
This word first described men—especially Northeasterners—with a penchant for fashion, worldliness, and foreign fare. It also boasts a curious connection to "macaronic language." Hey dude! Ever wonder about the origin of the word “dude”? This word is first recorded in the late 1800s as a word for a man who is foppish and fastidious, meaning… Continue reading The Etymology of “Dude”
A 12-year-old girl named Gloria Lockerman is the reason you learned the word "antidisestablishmentarianism" when you were a kid. Remember how you and your friends would toss it around, touting it as one of the longest words—if not the longest—in the English language? There are of course many longer words, many of them scientific or… Continue reading How 12-year-old Gloria Lockerman taught us the word “disestablishmentarianism”
Space-related words have some of the most enchanting etymologies in the cosmos.We call our galaxy the Milky Way because the stars and other matter that compose it look like milk splashed across the night sky. But did you know that’s also where the word “galaxy” itself comes from? It originally comes from the Greek phrase… Continue reading Out of This Word: The Origins of 5 Intergalactic Terms
My book, Once Upon a Word: A Word-Origin Dictionary for Kids (Rockridge Press, Feb. 25, 2020), is dedicated to a woman named Nanette Quinn. You can read the dedication below. Let me tell you a bit about Nanette Quinn. When I was in high school, I took French with Nanette Quinn, whom we called Madame… Continue reading On the Importance of Looking Up Words
"Carpenter" is from the Late Latin carpentum ("wagon, carriage, cart"), with a maker of wooden carts known as an artifex carpentarius. In English, "carpenter" replaced the word treowwyrhta, literally "tree-wright." "Carpenter" began to replace treowwyrhta in the 1300s, adopted from the Anglo-French carpenter (Old North French carpentier) and first specifically referring to someone who does… Continue reading The Etymology of “Carpenter”
Like many words of its kind, etymology found its way to English in the 14th century by way of Old French, at which point it simply robbed the older language of the term etimologie or ethimologie. English is quite the thief, you see.
Useless Etymology 