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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lunatic-fringe (paid)

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SWAT / swatting (paid)

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leap-year

The necessity for adding a day to the calendar every four years is due to the fact that the Earth’s orbit of the sun is not exactly 365 days; it’s closer to 365.25 days. Therefore, about every four years we add one day to the calendar to

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moscovium (paid)

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molybdenum

Molydenum is a chemical element with atomic number 42 and the symbol Mo. It has been known since antiquity but was generally considered a type of lead or graphite. It wasn’t classified as an element until the eighteenth century. The element takes its name from the Latin molybdaena, a

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Valkyrie

Words disappear from the language all the time. The concepts they represent become less useful or they are replaced by spiffier, newer terms and fade into obscurity and eventual disappearance from all but the largest of historical dictionaries. But occasionally these words are plucked from the fields of the slain

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bachelor (paid)

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G-man

To an American, a G-man is a federal law enforcement officer, and the G is generally taken to come from government, but this may not be the case. There is an earlier Irish use of G-man used to refer to police officers of the G Division, the detective division, of

mendelevium

Mendelevium is a radioactive, synthetic chemical element in the actinide series with atomic number 101 and the symbol Md. It has no uses outside of pure research. It was first synthesized at the University of California Berkeley by a team led by Stanley G. Thompson that included Albert Ghiorso, Glenn

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molybdenum (paid)

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Australia

The continent of Australia gets its name, appropriately enough, from the Latin australis, meaning southern. And the name Terra australis incognita (unknown southern land) has been applied to hypothetical southern continents since antiquity. There is no all-encompassing Indigenous name for the continent; instead there is a wide variety of local

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G-man (paid)

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

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

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mendelevium (paid)

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superb-owl

The NFL championship game is sometimes jocularly referred to as the Superb Owl. Tracing exactly who came up with the coinage is impossible—it was probably independently coined multiple times. The official name of the game, Super Bowl, was coined in 1966. Officially, the name is two words, but is

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

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Australia (paid)

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America

The continents of North and South America are named for Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512). Vespucci made at least two voyages to the New World, one in 1499–1500 and another in 1501–02. He is alleged to have made two others, one before and one after the known voyages, but

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manganese

Beginning chemistry students frequently confuse manganese and magnesium, but the confusion is nothing new. The two were routinely conflated by even the best chemists until the late eighteenth century. Manganese is a chemical element with atomic number 25 and the symbol Mn. It is a hard, brittle, silvery metal with

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mercury-quicksilver (paid)

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bowl-super-bowl (paid)