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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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)

inauguration

Our present-day English word inauguration comes from the Latin inauguratio. Augury was the practice of interpreting the behavior of birds as omens. Hence inauguratio connoted the beginning of an endeavor with favorable omens. The Latin noun appears in the writings of Tertullian (c. 155–c. 220 CE), but the word

B movie

A B movie is a low-budget, low-budget film. The division of films into two quality-based groupings dates to the earliest days of the film industry and has precursors in the practices of vaudeville theater. But the B movie as we know it today arises out of the distribution methods used

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makjang (paid)

ADS 2024 Word of the Year (WOTY)

The American Dialect Society has selected rawdog as its 2024 Word of the Year (WOTY 2024). Rawdog is an excellent choice for a number of reasons. The word dates to at least 2002—to be considered, words need only to be newly prominent, not newly coined, in the year in

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samarium (paid)

ruthenium

Ruthenium is a chemical element with atomic number 44 and the symbol Ru. The metal is a member of the platinum group and usually found in platinum ores. Like other members of that group it is generally unreactive. Ruthenium is used in alloys, especially in electronic equipment, to increase hardness

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inauguration (paid)

soap opera / horse opera / space opera

A soap opera is a melodramatic, serial drama. The term is also used figuratively to denote real-life events of the type that would be dramatized in the genre. Soap operas got their start in radio before moving on to television and were typically broadcast in the daytime with a target

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B movie (paid)

luxury

Today, we associate luxury with wealth, opulence, and indulgence, but the word originally meant lust, sexual intercourse, or just more generally sensual pleasure. The word was imported into English by the Normans, coming from the Old French luxure (lust, lechery), which in turn is from the Latin luxuria, which meant