Tag: Fun Etymology

Hey there, inhabitants of the Internetz! It’s Tuesday here in cloudy Edinburgh, and it’s time for our usual Fun Etymology post.

Did you know that when Alexander Graham Bell popularised the telephone in the late 19th century, the word he proposed should be used when answering was “ahoy”?
Yes, the pirate greeting.
And yes, that would have been waaay more fun than “hello”.

Speaking of “hello”: that’s our word this week!

Believe it or not, this now ubiquitous word became the common greeting in the English language only around 1880, when it won over “ahoy” as the telephone-answering word of choice, and until the 1920s it was widely considered to be (*gasp*) an Americanism.

The word itself is a variant spelling of the then more common “hallo”, itself derived from a previous word “holla”, which can be traced back as far as the 14th century. Before that, its origins are a mystery. The Oxford English Dictionary proposes that its origins lie in the emphatic imperative of the Old High German verb “halôn”, meaning “to fetch”, and that it was originally used for hailing ferrymen.

Before becoming the typical English greeting, it was mainly used as an exclamation of surprise, as in “hello! what’s this?” or “hello! Look what I found!”

We’re still not over the fact that we’re not going around greeting each other like pirates in Erroll Flynn movies, but them’s the breaks, folks.

Remember, if there’s a word that piques your curiosity and you want to know more, tell us in a comment, and we’ll consider exploring its history for you!

‘Til the tide rises again, mateys!

Hi everyone!

As those of you who can infer patterns from single occurrences might know, Tuesday is Fun Etymology Day here at the HLC.

However, this Tuesday is also Halloween! What an amazing coincidence! (Or is it???)
So, just for today, we’ll be having Spooky Etymology Day.

Today’s word is “werewolf”.

Ever since people started gathering around campfires at night, the werewolf has always been a fixture of scary stories: a human being who transforms into a ferocious wolf under the light of the full moon, overwhelmed by an insatiable urge to kill everyone they meet.

You probably already guessed what the “wolf” part of “werewolf” means, so we won’t dwell on that.
But what exactly is that “were” bit which distinguishes this terrifying beast from a regular old wolf?
One thing we can anticipate: it’s not the past tense of “to be”.

The “were” of “werewolf” is, in fact, the last remnant of the Old English word “wer”, which was once the common word for “man”, before disappearing and being replaced by the modern word “man” sometime around the 13th century. Those of you who studied Latin might recognize this word as coming from the same root as the Latin word “vir” (pronounced “weer”), meaning the same thing.

However, the word “man” was never able to fully kill its predecessor, and the word “wer” lives on in undeath, forever chained to its bestial counterpart in the word “werewolf”, the man-wolf!

Happy Halloween everybody!

Fun etymology time!

English is a very cosmopolitan language: it has borrowed words from a great number of languages from all over the world.

For example, did you know that the words “avocado” and “guacamole” come from the same root word?

Both of them come from Classical Nahuatl, the language spoken in the Aztec Empire before the regrettable arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.

The original Nahuatl word was “ahuacatl” (pronounced /a’wakatɬ/, for those of you who can read the IPA), which was at first borrowed into Spanish as “aguacate”. However, fairly early on it became confused with the already existing Spanish word “avocado”, meaning ‘lawyer’, and was soon enough assimilated into English as such. A less common English name for the fruit, “alligator pear”, comes from an English reinterpretation of the word “ahuacatl” as “alligator”, probably influenced by the fruit’s rough green skin, somewhat reminiscent of the alligator’s scaly hide.

What about “guacamole”? Well, that’s simply a composite of the Nahuatl words “ahuacatl” and “molli”, meaning ‘paste’: “ahuacamolli”, meaning ‘avocado paste’.

Have some with your nachos, you probably don’t need us to tell you that it’s delicious.