Dave Wilton

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

callow

Callow is a word that dates back to the beginnings of the English language, but it has shifted in meaning significantly over the past eleven-hundred years. Today it means inexperienced or naive, and it often appears in the phrase callow youth. But way back when it was associated with aging,

Great Depression

I am always interested in the question of when various historical events acquire their names. For instance, when did people realize the global economic downturn that started with the Wall Street crash of October 1929 was great. And when did it become The Great Depression, an event with no peer?

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grotesque (paid)

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chauvinism (paid)

awesome / awful

When I typed awesome into the search box* on urbandictionary.com, the first definition that popped up, authored by someone who goes by the apt screenname of Spleenvent, is: Something Americans use to describe everything. [* = Your results may vary. This is what I got when I searched for the word

Easter / Easter bunny / pasch / paschal

(This is a repost from the archives. It was originally posted on 24 March 2024.) Easter is the name for the Christian celebration of Jesus’s resurrection. The name is an old one, going back to Old English. The root is Germanic and, unsurprisingly, is related to the cardinal direction

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callow (paid)

sheriff / reeve

A sheriff is a government official whose duties vary depending on the jurisdiction. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, sheriff is a ceremonial office. In Scotland, a sheriff is a judge. Elsewhere, sheriffs are typically bailiffs, enforcing judicial orders, managing prisoners, and sometimes they operate police forces and have law

gizmo

Gizmo is a generic, slang name for an object. If you want to refer to something and don’t have a name for it at hand, it is a gizmo. The term is of unknown origin, but very probably is a nonsense coinage. It arises in US Marine Corps slang

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Great Depression (paid)

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awesome / awful (paid)

Good Friday

Good Friday is the day when Christians commemorate the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ, which leads many people to ask, “what’s so good about it?” That’s a fair question, and the answer is that good has been used to designate a number of religious holidays. In Old

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sheriff / reeve (paid)

Maundy Thursday

The day before Good Friday is often called Maundy Thursday, but that term is a bit mysterious to most modern English speakers. Outside of the name of the holiday, Maundy isn’t a word we much use anymore. The word comes to us from the Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French

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gizmo (paid)

catfish

Catfish are fish of the orders Siluriformes or Nematognathi, so named because their distinctive barbels (a type of sensory organ) resemble a cat’s whiskers. The name dates to at least 1612, when John Smith records it in his description of the colony of Virginia: Of fish we were best

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Good Friday (paid)

yard

In Present-Day English, yard has several meanings, but the two dominant ones are an open area near a house or other building and a unit of linear measure. But while spelled and pronounced the same, these are two separate words, descending from different Old English roots. The first, the open

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Maundy Thursday (paid)

weapon of mass destruction / WMD / conventional weapon

Most people became aware of the terms weapon of mass destruction and WMD during the run up to the first Gulf War in 1990–91. And they again entered the public consciousness during the second war with Iraq which started twelve years later. Both times Saddam Hussein had been thought

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gooners & gooning

urban / suburbs / suburbia / burbs

The typical path of a term’s development is the appearance of the root, then the root is added to, through compounding, adding affixes (i.e., derivation), or some other means. Then it may be clipped to shorter form. But urban / suburban reverses this usual order. We see the clipped

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catfish (paid)

viking

We all have a solid idea of what a viking was, one of a band of a horned-helmeted, Old Norse warriors who ravaged northern Europe in the medieval period. And that idea is wrong. Not only did viking helmets not have horns, the Norse people who sailed about the northern

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yard (paid)