Wordorigins.org Newsletter
  • Home
  • About
Sign in Subscribe
Newsletter

Halloween

  • Dave Wilton

Dave Wilton

24 Oct 2023 • 4 min read
Halloween
A Halloween jack o’ lantern

This post is for paying subscribers only

Subscribe now

Already have an account? Sign in

A man in 17th-century dress on horseback pulling himself and his horse out of a swamp by his own hair
Paid-members only

bootstrap / boot up (paid)

20 Oct 2025 5 min read
A table of 12 emoji showing stylized faces displaying various emotions and moods

emoji

Emoji are pictograms used in electronic communications. An emoji is a digital icon used to express an emotion or idea, a twenty-first century updating of the old ascii emoticons like the winking face, ;-), used to mark a joke or sarcasm.  The etymology is rather straightforward but may be a
20 Oct 2025 1 min read
A 17th-century court in an uproar, a woman in the dock, lightning comes through a window, a man lies prone on the floor

witch hunt

The phrase witch hunt is surprisingly recent. One might expect it to date to the seventeenth century, when real hunts for supposed witches were rampant across Europe. But its use in relation to witches only dates to the late nineteenth century and its political use only to the twentieth. And
17 Oct 2025 4 min read
Wordorigins.org Newsletter © 2025
  • Sign up
Powered by Ghost