Bundle Where the word came from Everyday words and symbols traced back to an odd origin.
Finds
- Zazzy Flashy, colorful, or stylish
- Spizzerinctum Energy, courage, and determination
- Zillionaire A person with incalculably enormous wealth
- Irrupt To burst or break in
- Exute To strip or deprive of something
- Wheal A small raised swelling on the skin
- Calender A machine that presses sheets between rollers
- Venust Beautiful, graceful, elegant
- Voracity Veracity's one-letter twin asks whether there's more, not whether it's true
- Calque A word built by translating another language's parts
- Ideocracy Rule by ideas, one letter away from rule by idiots
- Veracity Truthfulness or accuracy, and something true
- Venous Why veins look blue when venous blood is dark red
- Casque A helmet you grow yourself, on record since before 1586
- Androgynous Having both — or neither — on record since 1628
- Idiocracy Government by idiots — a word that predates the film by 39 years
- kidology How Holyfield's trainer lied about the clock
- timorous Russia's railway chief on why the fast trains stayed away from Finland
- misgiving On exam day in Korea, air-traffic control holds every takeoff for the listening section
- soporiferous A sermon so sleep-inducing that the preacher had to shriek
- decedent One Latin root away from decadent, and both words met in the same will
- mordent The word for a musical bite, which cannot stop biting its own spelling
- Rosery A garden given over to roses — and the reason prayer beads are named after them
- Villein The villein worked a plot; the villain plotted
- Evert To turn inside out — as sea stars do with their stomachs
- Breviloquent A twelve-letter, four-syllable word for using few words
- Macilent One adjective for a thin man and a thin argument, on the books since before 1425
- Nidorous An adjective for burnt-meat stench that's been on the books since 1626
- Rorid An adjective for dewy that's been waiting since 1425
- cowhearted Coward is all tail and no cow
- moth-wing Fragile or fleeting — and a noun for the thing itself
- stickybeak Nose becomes beak, and the word gets better
- dogleg Named for the angle in a dog's hind leg
- Chumocracy Rule by the people you already know
- Obganiate To annoy someone by saying the same thing again. And again.
- Solivagant A word for wandering alone, in writing since 1621
- gangway A word that says "way" twice
- concomitance A word that arrives accompanied by its own companion
- hapchance Luck luck — English decided one word for good fortune wasn't enough
- circumambient A word that goes around, and then goes around again
- Pismire The word for an ant, from urine and mire
- Mordant The word for a cutting remark is also the chemical that bites into the plate
- Skirr The searching and the sound the searching makes
- Rapture To seize, and to be seized
- Assart One word for the field and for the clearing of it
- dowfart The rudest-looking word that isn't
- Don't just do something. Sit there. Widely credited to Thich Nhat Hanh; first found in 1954, as orders written for men stationed alone on radar platforms at sea.
- Crotchet The etymological twin of crochet, and no relation to the word you're hearing
- Disannul A prefix that agrees with itself instead of reversing
- European Country Names Explained One of them means land of the rabbits
- Withsay The 'with' in it means against
- Etymologue Word origins you can walk forwards as well as back
- Misdoubt A prefix that reinforces instead of reversing
- Antipelargy A word for the care children return to their parents
- Bellwether The sheep that named the trend
- Expiscate To fish out — the verb for finding something by patient investigation
- Ettercap The Old English word for spider, still the best insult for a gossip
- Auspicate To begin an undertaking is, etymologically, to birdwatch first
- Gamy Six unrelated senses, one word — and no relation to '-gamy'
- Noodle One spelling, three unrelated word histories
- Cucumbers Were Once Called 'Cowcumbers' An archaic English name for cucumbers, still used in some 18th-century texts
- Smithfield match A 1703 phrase for marriage of convenience, from a London livestock market
- Rake's progress A 1733 Hogarth series became a phrase for decline by folly
- Pythagoras on the Philosopher at the Olympics Where the word 'philosopher' actually came from
- Silphium and the Origin of the Heart Symbol The plant that gave us ❤ — and is being un-extincted