Dave Wilton

Dave has a PhD in medieval English literature from the University of Toronto and has been publishing Wordorigins.org since 1997.

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palladium (paid)

oxygen

Oxygen is a chemical element with atomic number eight and the symbol O. It is a highly reactive nonmetal that is a gas at room temperature. It’s the most abundant element in the earth’s crust and the third most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen and helium.

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dollars to doughnuts (paid)

bee's knees

Most people associate the bee’s knees, meaning something that is excellent or otherwise superlative, with the Roaring ’20s and the Jazz Age. But while the phrase did come into its present-day meaning shortly before and experienced a rise in popularity during that era, it has precursor meanings that predate

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meme stock (paid)

creek / up shit's creek

I had no idea that British usage of creek was different from the use of the word in the rest of the English-speaking world until I was translating an Old Norse work (appropriately enough regarding the discovery and exploration of Vinland) and found that my Old Norse dictionary, produced in

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oxygen (paid)

zirconium / zircon / hyacinth

Zirconium is a chemical element with atomic number 40 and the symbol Zr. It is a lustrous, gray-white metal. The mineral zirconium silicate, also known as zircon, is common in the earth’s crust and has been known since antiquity. Zirconium has a variety of commercial uses, and zircon crystals

spaghettify / spaghettification

Astronomers are often rather creative with the names they come up with for the objects and processes they discover. An example is the verb to spaghettify and the noun spaghettification. The words describe what would happen to a person (or thing) who fell into a black hole. The gravity (tidal

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bee's knees (paid)

cat's pajamas / whiskers / meow

The phrase the cat’s pajamas (also cat’s whiskers or cat’s meow), meaning something superlative or excellent, is indelibly associated with the 1920s and the jazz age. The phrase is often credited to cartoonist Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan, but while he did use the cat’s meow (and

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creek / up shit's creek (paid)

oganesson

Oganesson is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 118 and the symbol Og. The element is named for Yuri Oganessian (b. 1933), a lead researcher at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia. Oganesson is the second element to be named after a living person, the other

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zirconium / zircon / hyacinth (paid)

ham

A ham is a bad or overly dramatic and emotive actor. But why ham? What does the meat have to do with the theater? In this case the etymology, where the word comes from, is reasonably clear, but the etiology, why it is so, remains mysterious, with the only answers

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spaghettify / spaghettification (paid)

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cat's pajamas / whiskers / meow (paid)

jabroni

Fans of professional wrestling will undoubtedly be familiar with the term jabroni, meaning a loser, a poser, an incompetent or substandard wrestler. The wrestler (now actor and general-purpose celebrity) Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson popularized the term beginning in the late 1990s. To call someone a jabroni is, of course, an

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ham (paid)

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oganesson (paid)

nobelium

In theory, the naming of new chemical elements should be rather straightforward: the scientists who first discover/synthesize the element suggest a name, which is officially approved by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). But the naming of element 102, nobelium, is twisted and fraught with controversy

pretendian

Pretendian is a word that has yet to make it into any major dictionary, and it refers to a person who falsely claims to be Native-American or to have Native-American ancestry. It’s etymology is rather obvious, a blend of pretend + Indian. Pretendians range from people who have been told

Canada

The name Canada comes from Huron-Iroquois kanata (kaná:taʔ), meaning town or settlement, entering English through French. The original town in question was the Iroquois village of Stadaconé, the site of the present-day Quebec City. French-Breton explorer Jacques Cartier reached Stadaconé in July 1534, taking the chief, Donnacona, and several

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jabroni (paid)

nitrogen

Nitrogen is the chemical element with atomic number 7 and the symbol N. It is the most common element in the earth’s atmosphere. The English name is borrowed from French, which formed it as a combination of nitre and ‑gène. The latter lexeme is from the Greek -γενής (-genes)