Dave Wilton - Wordorigins.org Newsletter (Page 18)

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Dave Wilton

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

Black-and-white photo of four men standing in the snow and looking at a small, Norwegian flag flying from a pole

Arctic / Antarctic

Artic and Antarctic have pretty straightforward etymologies. The only hiccup is that they are borrowed from both French and Latin—English acquired the words in the late fourteenth century, at a time when the literati were conversant in both French and Latin, so it is impossible to untangle the influences

Photo of silvery, metallic liquid being poured from a beaker into a petri dish

mercury / quicksilver

Mercury is a chemical element with atomic number 80 and the symbol Hg. It is the only metallic element that is liquid at standard temperature and pressure. (Elemental bromine is also a liquid, but not a metal.) Mercury has a wide variety of uses, ranging from thermometers to fluorescent lighting

bowl / Super Bowl

With every new year comes the onslaught of bowl games: the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Rose Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, the Aloha Bowl, and of course the Super Bowl. Why do we call these gridiron football contests bowls? The word bowl is an old one, and the most

A round diagram depicting the three continents of Asia and the east (top), with Europe and Africa below

Africa

The name of Africa, the second largest continent in both size and population, comes from the Latin Africanus. The Latin name, in turn, probably comes from Ifran, the name of a people in what is now Tunisia and eastern Algeria, ancestors of the modern Amazigh (Berber) people. Various origins for

A round diagram depicting the three continents of Asia and the east (top), with Europe and Africa below

Europe

The toponym Europe is widely claimed to come from ancient Greek Εὐρώπη (Europé), the name of a Phoenician princess of Tyre who was abducted by Zeus in the form a bull. The tale dates to the Mycenaean period (1750–1050 BCE). Variations of the tale as to exactly who Europa