Category: Fun Etymology

Ladies and gents!

Welcome to 2019 and the very first Fun Etymology of the year!

Speaking of the new year, this year is the last -teen-year of the century (nineTEEN, that is)! In honour of that, today’s word is more of a word-forming element: you guessed it, it’s -teen!

This word-forming element marks cardinal numbers from 13 to 19 and means “ten more than”, so “ten more than 9” = 19.
It comes to us from Anglian Old English -tēne, West Saxon -tiene, which developed from an inflected form of Proto-Germanic *tehun, meaning “ten”. The Proto-Germanic word comes from Proto-Indo-European *déḱm̥t. In this element, we can see a real sound change happening: the English element -teen is cognate with Italian -dici, from Latin -decim. Notice that the PIE word which they come from starts with a <d> and so does the derived word in Latin and Italian? But in English, it starts with a <t>! Isn’t that just a beautiful example of Grimm’s Law?

Welcome to the year two thousand and nineteen, friends, and to another year of language fun!

Friends! A merry Christmas to you all! Aside from being Christmas Day, today is also…. Fun Etymology Tuesday!! You did get a taste yesterday with the Scandinavian word ‘Jul’ and today, we’ll continue on that line of words: today’s word is ‘Christmas’ itself!

Christmas is actually a shortened version of ‘Christ’s mass’ and the first time it pops up in English is in 1038, as ‘Crīstemæsse’. Of course, the word itself can basically be split in two: Crist- and -mæsse. Crist- refers to Christianity’s Jesus Christ, but the word itself comes from Greek Khrīstos, which is a translation from Hebrew Māšîah (Messiah) meaning “anointed”.
The second part of our word for today,
-mæsse, comes from Latin ‘missa’, which refers to the rite of Holy Communion in the Christian faith.

But did you know that, before “Christmas” became the popular word on the block, Anglo-Saxons also used the word “Nātiuiteð” from Latin nātīvitās, meaning “birth”. The modern English word is “nativity”. So, if Christmas hadn’t stuck around, you might have been walking about, telling your (non-pregnant) neighbour to have a great nativity!

But, of course, that didn’t happen, and so, the HLC wishes every one of our readers a very merry Xmas! (Did you know: the abbreviation has actually been around since Middle English, during which we find ‘Χρ̄es masse’ where the Χρ̄ is short for Greek Χριστός, ‘Khrīstos’?)

Merry Christmas, dear friends, from all of us here at the HLC!

God jul, dear friends!

We know, we know, it’s only Monday, but, this week, we have a special etymology for you: Today’s word is “Jul”!
‘Jul’ is the Scandinavian word for, you guessed it, Yule (though, technically, it functions more like ‘Christmas’). The word comes to us from Old Norse jól, meaning ‘midwinter season’, which comes from Proto-Germanic *jehwlą, meaning ‘festivity’, which comes to us from PIE *jekə- meaning ‘joke, play’. The English equivalent, Yule, comes from Old English ġeōl, also meaning ‘midwinter season’, which may either share the same root as jul or simply be borrowed from those savage Vikings plaguing the land (we’re not really sure)

But, it’s not Tuesday, so why etymology today, right? Well, today, at least two of us here at the HLC celebrate Christmas, or jul! You see, in the Scandinavian countries, you celebrate on Christmas Eve, not on Christmas day! Why? Supposedly, people here used to consider the day ended when the sun set (and let us assure you, it does that really early here in Scandinavia in December), so they thought that what we now think of as Christmas Eve to be Christmas Day!

So, in true (Swedish) fashion:
Från oss alla, till er alla: en riktigt god jul!
(From all of us, to all of you: have a very merry Christmas!)

Hello, my dear followers! It’s Tuesday, and, as usual, it’s time for another word history to come your way!

Today’s word is “kitchen”.

Where I come from, in the Mediterranean, the kitchen is a temple. It’s one of the most sacred spaces in the house. It’s where food is prepared and brought to the table.
The source of all deliciousness.
Every Italian person has fond memories of their grandmothers lovingly crafting some masterpiece in that holiest of sanctums.

The word “kitchen” and its sibling “cook” are a splendid example of two related words which have diverged so much in sound that it’s hard to tell they’re cognates.
“Kitchen” comes from Old English “cycene”, itself from Proto-Germanic *kokina. This word was probably a very early loanword directly from Latin, as the first Germanic tribes were nomadic and did not have kitchens. In Latin, it is “coquina”, coming from “coquus”, the etymology of the English word “cook”!
They all come from the PIE root *pekw-, ‘to cook, to prepare’.

Hello, sweet followers!
It’s Tuesday, and it’s time to bring you another interesting tidbit of word history!

Today’s word is “checkmate”.

Chess is the prototype of the “smart” game. When we think of a very intellectual, scheming person we more often than not picture them as playing chess in their spare time.
There’s good reason for this: this game, which originated in India around 250 AD, is easy to learn, but difficult to master. It requires deep thinking and a keen eye for opportunity, and it’s one of the most complex games we play (though not the most complex: that honour probably belongs to Go, invented in China before the 6th century BC. It is so complex, the number of possible board positions has been estimated at 10 to the 107th power. That’s 1000000000000000000000000000 times the number of atoms in the known universe! Chew on that a bit).
From India, the game made its way along the caravan routes to Persia, from where it reached us.
Everybody knows the word that signals victory in a chess match: “checkmate”. It’s become almost synonymous with intellectual victory: you’ve seen it pronounced by detectives and supervillains alike in many movies and books.
But it is a peculiar word, isn’t it? Why “check”? And why “mate”? Are you inviting your friends to take a look at the sick winning move you just pulled?
Well, no. The word comes to us from Old French “eschec mat”, which itself comes from the Persian phrase “shah mat”, meaning “the king is dead”, the ultimate winning condition in chess.

Next time you outsmart your archnemesis, regale them with this tidbit of etymological trivia for extra smugness points!

Hello, my language friends! It’s Tuesday again and this means, you guessed it, another fun etymology!

Today’s word is “moon”.

Ah, the Moon. If the Sun is the originator of all life and movement on Earth, the Moon is certainly the great timekeeper. Various animal species use its light to time their reproductive cycles, and, since time immemorial, humans have used its convenient phase cycle to determine where they were in time. It’s also the closest astronomical body to Earth, and our greatest companion. Countless poems have been written of its beauty, and its pockmarked face is a constant friend in the sky: Europeans saw a man looking down at them in the patterns of craters and dry lava seas; the Chinese a bunny zealously working on the elixir of immortality.

From its use as time measurer, the Moon gets its name: it comes from Old English “mona”, from Proto-Germanic “*monan”, itself from Proto-Indo-European “*menses-“, which means “a measure of time”, and is the same root that gave us our word “month”. The ultimate root is PIE *me-, ‘to measure’, which arrived to English also as the word “meter”, through Ancient Greek.

Hello good (and not-so-good, we don’t judge) people!
It’s Tuesday and it’s time for our appointment with the history of the English vocabulary.

Today’s word is “planet”.

Everybody in the modern world knows of planets, whether it be from astronomy classes in school or science fiction, and we all know what a planet is, right?
Well, it turns out that amongst astronomers, the actual definition of “planet” is still a bit controversial. The currently accepted definition is the following: “an astronomical body massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity (which excludes asteroids), not massive enough to initiate thermonuclear fusion (which excludes stars), and which has cleared its orbital neighbourhood of planetesimals (i.e. small rocky bodies)”. The addition of this last clause to the definition famously resulted in the “demotion” of former planet Pluto to “dwarf planet”, or “Kuiper belt object”, a decision that was made firstly because of its very small size (it’s smaller than Russia!), and secondly because the cascading discovery of similar objects would have made the Solar System have thousands of planets. You don’t want to memorise thousands of names at school, now, do you?

To the ancient Greek, though, the definition of planet was very simple: it was a star which moved instead of staying still. This is why they gave them the name “planetes”, which in Ancient Greek means “wanderer”, and from which our modern word “planet” comes.

Hello, my smart followers!
It’s Tuesday and as (somewhat less than) usual, it’s time for our weekly Fun Etymology!

Today’s word is “concert”.

When we think of concerts today, we mostly think about music. Whether it is a roaring rock or metal concert, or a refined classical concert, most of us have probably taken part in and, hopefully, enjoyed at least one of two.
The story of the word, however, is pretty curious, and at one point its meaning even flipped 180 degrees.

The word “concert” ultimately comes from Latin “concertare”, from “cum”, ‘with’ + “certare”, ‘fight’. The original meaning was ‘fight against’. How did it go from that to a music get-together? Well, in medieval Italian, the meaning of the word unexpectedly flipped to mean ‘to work together’, the exact opposite of its original meaning! We don’t really know how this happened, but the most likely explanation is that the first switch happened due to confusion between the two meanings of Latin “cum”: ‘against’ and ‘together with’. The word would then have switched from meaning ‘fight against’ to ‘fight alongside’.
From there it moved to English in a musical context through the influx of Italian musical vocabulary that accompanied the formalisation of musical theory in the late 17th century.

Hello, my sweet, sweet followers. I hope you’ve been well!
After a rather baffling two-week hiatus, we bring back what you’ve all been craving for: our weekly instalment of Fun Etymologies!

Today’s word is “paper”.

Paper is a wonderful material. Invented in the 2nd century by the Chinese Han imperial court eunuch Cai Lun, this humble wood fibre byproduct has revolutionised the world.
Thanks to paper, writing became immensely easier, no longer being dependent on laboriously curated animal skin, or fragile clay, or intractable rock. And writing is just one of its uses: it can be used for cleaning, packaging, art and much much more, and it ushered in the paper money revolution.

The word “paper” comes to English from Old French “papier”, itself derived from Latin “papyrus”. That’s right: the same as the modern English word “papyrus”, the name of a plant native to Egypt whose fibres allowed the creation of a material very similar to paper, which made the Egyptians the undisputed masters of ancient writing.
The origins of the word “papyrus” itself are uncertain.

So next time you find yourself writing a letter, or an essay, or a novel, or whispering your most intimate secrets to a padlocked diary, remember to stop and appreciate paper, that most versatile and useful of materials.

Hello fantastic fellows!
P1: If it’s Tuesday the HLC posts a Fun Etymology.
P2: It’s Tuesday
C: The HLC posts a Fun Etymology

Today’s word is “electricity”.

It’s hard to overstate the revolution electricity brought about in the course of human history. Our entire civilisation runs on it: I’m using it to write this post now, you’re using it to read it, and we’re all using it to keep warm, to have light at night, to cook, to pump water in our houses, to drive our cars, and millions of other things. And to think that just a century and a half ago it was nothing more than an academic curiosity!*

It is a testament to the capacity of the human mind to get used to just about anything that we wake up every day in a world in which people move from one continent to another in giant metal birds powered by the chained might of lightning and we still manage to be bored.

The discovery of electricity goes back surprisingly far in history, to the time of our favourite nerd-jocks: the Ancient Greeks. They discovered that when you rub a piece of amber on a rough cloth, it develops the property of attracting other materials, including water. This is due to what we today call static electricity or the triboelectric effect. It has to do with electron exchange, look it up! It’s really cool.
In Ancient Greek, the word for “amber” was “elektron”, so this property was called “electricity”, the property of being amber-like. This name was given to it by the English scientist William Gilbert, who first brought electricity to the academic world in 1600. Fun fact: in his “His Dark Materials” trilogy, Philip Pullman gives a different etymology to the word “electric”, which becomes “ambaric”, directly from “amber” (which comes from Arabic ‘anbar. Double etymology!)

It took millennia before someone discovered this property of amber was the same thing that made lightning work, when Benjamin Franklin famously tied a key to a kite string and let it fly in a lightning storm, demonstrating that lightning is electrical because it grounds itself through metal.
Don’t do this at home kids, it’s a miracle he survived.

*Which reminds me of something that really grinds my gears: when people disparage pure theoretical research as useless. “Why do we pour so much money in smashing particles together when we could spend it on hunger relief?” Well, if people in the 1800s hadn’t poured resources in useless (at the time) stuff like electricity, our modern civilisation wouldn’t even exist, and with it, all the benefits that it brings. Including hunger relief!