Dave Wilton

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

selenium

Selenium is a chemical element with atomic number 34 and the symbol Se. It can appear as a red powder; a vitreous, black solid; or a gray metallic solid. It is rarely found in nature in a pure form, found usually in metal sulfide ores where it takes the place

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silicon (paid)

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rawdog (paid)

mind-meld

Science fiction is a productive source of neologisms. Sometimes what is envisioned in fiction enters the lexicon before science makes it a reality, and sometimes futuristic and fantastic concepts that can never be real enter the language through the genre. When we talk of the intersection between science fiction and

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moonstruck (paid)

meh

Meh is an interjection expressing apathy or uninterest. We don’t know exactly when people began using it, nor where it comes from. Two explanations are commonly proffered. The first is that it is simply a transcription of an inarticulate, oral grunt or sigh. The second is that it comes

Pornhub's WOTY

I have a post on the Strong Language blog on the most popular Pornhub search terms in 2024, from hentai to twink to Mormon threesome. Be sure to check it out.

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dry January / sober-curious / soberocracy

concentration camp

One might, with some justification, think that the term concentration camp, like the term genocide https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/genocide-1 , came out of Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II, but that is not the case. The term is almost half a century older, coming out of

seaborgium

Seaborgium is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 106 and the symbol Sg. Its most stable isotopes have half lives of only a few minutes, and it has no applications other than pure research. The element is named after chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, who not only led the discovery

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selenium (paid)

algospeak

What is algospeak? Taylor Lorenz, in a piece for the online Washington Post on 8 April 2022, defined it thusly: “Algospeak” is becoming increasingly common across the Internet as people seek to bypass content moderation filters on social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Twitch. Algospeak refers to

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mind-meld (paid)

meat

Vegetarians don’t eat meat, at least they don’t nowadays. But had there been vegetarians a millennium ago, they would have. For, you see, meat did not always mean the flesh of animals. In Old English, the word mete meant simply food. It comes from the Proto-Germanic root *mati-,

march

March has many different meanings; the Oxford English Dictionary has six different entries for march as a noun and two as a verb. But the sense considered here is that of walking or moving forward. The word first appears in English in the fifteenth century as a verb meaning to

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meh (paid)

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seaborgium (paid)

scandium / Scandinavia

Scandium is a chemical element with atomic number 21 and the symbol Sc. It is a silvery-white, rare-earth metal. It’s major application is in aluminum alloys for aircraft and sporting equipment. It is also used in some metal halide lamps, and the Scandium-46 radioisotope is used as a tracing

lunch / luncheon / out to lunch

Lunch and luncheon have a confusing etymology. One might think that luncheon is the original, and that lunch is a clipping of it, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, even though the form luncheon is found earlier in the extant record. Both words originally referred to a

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meat (paid)

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march (paid)

makjang

This word came to my attention recently when a friend used it to describe the American television series E.R. (1994–2004), about the frantic lives and loves of the staff at an inner-city Chicago hospital emergency room. Makjang describes a drama, usually a television drama and a Korean one

samarium

Samarium is a chemical element with atomic number 62 and the symbol Sm. It is a hard, silvery metal that oxidizes in air. Samarium has a variety of uses, the chief one being in samarium-cobalt magnets. Other uses include as a chemical catalyst, radioactive dating, and x-ray lasers. The radioactive

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scandium / Scandinavia (paid)

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lunch / luncheon / out to lunch (paid)