Dave Wilton

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

zinc

Zinc is a chemical element with atomic number 30 and the symbol Zn. It is a brittle metal at room temperature with a shiny, gray color. Trace amounts of zinc are essential for life as we know it, and the metal is used in a wide variety of alloys. The

Paid-members only

calcium (paid)

Newsletter

Father Christmas

(I’m reposting some older, seasonal articles on the feed’s off days. This article was first published on Wordorigins.org on 16 December 2021.) Father Christmas is a British personification of Christmas. In centuries prior, there were other personifications of the holiday, but Father Christmas’s name and iconic

merry / God rest you merry

Merry has a quite straightforward origin, although the title and first line of the Christmas carol God rest you merry, gentlemen is confusing to some. Merry comes from the Old English myrige, meaning pleasant or delightful. An example of the Old English can be found in Ælfric of Eynsham’s

Newsletter

Christmas / Xmas

(I’m reposting some older, seasonal articles on the feed’s off days. This article was first published on Wordorigins.org on 18 December 2023.) Christmas has a rather straightforward and obvious etymology. It is Christ’s mass, the religious service and festival associated with Jesus’s birthday. The word

reindeer

Reindeer, Rangifer tarandus, are a species of deer native to the arctic and subarctic of Europe, Siberia, and North America. The word is a borrowing from the Scandinavian languages—it’s hreindýri in Old Icelandic and rendjur in Swedish. (The usual word in Swedish is simply ren, but rendjur is

Paid-members only

poinsettia (paid)

Newsletter

Scrooge / screw

(I’m reposting some older, seasonal articles on the feed’s off days. This article was first published on Wordorigins.org on 13 December 2021.) A scrooge is a miser, a stingy person. And most of us recognize that the word comes from the name of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles

Newsletter

mistletoe

(I’m reposting some older, seasonal articles on the feed’s off days. This article was first published on Wordorigins.org on 10 December 2021.) Mistletoe is a hemiparasitic plant of the order Santalales, especially European mistletoe (Viscum album). A hemiparasitic plant derives water and nutrients from its host plant

yttrium

Yttrium is a chemical element with atomic number 39 and the symbol Y. It is a silvery transition metal. It is used in the production of numerous electronic devices, notably in the phosphors in LED lights and formerly in cathode-ray tubes. Yttrium is toxic, and exposure to airborne yttrium dust

Paid-members only

zinc (paid)

wassail

Wassail and wassailing are associated with Yuletide revels and overindulgence, although many people are a bit fuzzy on what the words mean. That’s somewhat understandable as the words have a variety of meanings. Wassail started out as a simple greeting, became a drinking toast, then became the drink and

Paid-members only

merry / God rest you merry (paid)

Newsletter

Jack Frost

(I’m reposting some older, seasonal articles on the feed’s off days. This article was first published on Wordorigins.org on 21 December 2021.) Jack Frost is a personification of cold weather or of winter more generally. The etymology is quite straightforward, the personal name Jack + frost. The name

carol / carrel / corral

Why do we call them Christmas carols? The word carol was introduced into English by the Normans and comes from the Old French carole. It shares a root with words like chorus and choir. But in what may be surprising to most, the first English carols were not just songs;

Paid-members only

reindeer (paid)

Newsletter

yule

Bede: tripping up scholars for over a thousand years

Paid-members only

yttrium (paid)

ytterbium

Ytterbium is a chemical element with atomic number 70 and the symbol Yb. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal that is yellow or golden in color. It has a few specialized uses: its radioactive isotopes are used as sources of gamma rays and in atomic clocks; it is

Newsletter

Kris Kringle

(I’m reposting some older, seasonal articles. This article was first published on Wordorigins.org on 3 December 2021.) Kris Kringle is another name for Santa Claus. The name is a variation on the German Christkind, or Christkindl (Christ-child), a traditional gift-bringer at Christmas-time in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and elsewhere.

eggnog

Whence comes the name for the drink we know as eggnog? The egg is easy enough—it is made with eggs, but the nog is a stumper for most casual observers of the language. In an older entry, the Oxford English Dictionary dates eggnog to 1825, but the term has

Paid-members only

wassail (paid)

Paid-members only

carol / carrel / corral (paid)

juke / jukebox

A jukebox is a coin operated machine that plays selected musical recordings. The box part of the word is understood easily enough, but where does juke come from? Juke is actually two distinct words in English. The one that forms jukebox is recorded from the first half of the twentieth

anticipatory obedience

Anticipatory obedience is exactly what one would think, actions taken to obey what one perceives to be the wishes of a superior before being commanded to do so. The phrase is a relatively common in political science literature in reference to subjects’ compliance with the will of a totalitarian regime,