spendthrift / dingthrift Etymologically, spendthrift is rather unremarkable. It is a simple compound of the verb to spend and the noun thrift, meaning savings. A spendthrift, therefore, is someone who spends their savings, one who wastes money. The earliest use of the word that I’m aware of is in Stephen Batman’s
virus / viral Virus is a word that has evolved alongside the evolution in medical knowledge; before the twentieth century a virus was something quite different from the microorganisms we assign the name to today, and even more recently the word has broken the bounds of biology and infected the realm of silicon
March Madness [This is an archived post, originally published on 17 March 2023.] March Madness is the originally popular, later trademarked, name for the US National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball championship tournament held each year in that month. But the phrase did not originate with the NCAA, or even with basketball
slim The most common use of slim is as an adjective meaning slender or thin, but that is not the only use of the word, and its earliest known appearance in English is as a noun meaning a tall person. It’s a sixteenth-century borrowing from Dutch. In English, slim, meaning
polite It is quite common for a word with a specific and literal meaning to develop figurative or metaphorical meanings that are related to the literal one. And sometimes we can see this same change across multiple languages. Such is the case with polite. The Latin verb polire means to smooth,
tariff A tariff is a tax on imported or exported goods, or more precisely, it is a schedule of such tax rates for various types of goods. The word is also used more generally to mean a fee or charge. It was borrowed into English from the Italian tariffa in the
Mandela Effect The Mandela Effect is the phenomenon of many people sharing the same false memory. The classic examples, which are cited in nearly every description of the phenomenon, are memories of watching news reports of the death of Nelson Mandela in the 1980s, long before the South African leader's
robot / android Robots are a staple of science fiction and increasingly an important part of life in our present-day world. The word comes from the Czech robota, a word literally meaning forced labor (the root rob means slave) but which is also used figuratively to mean drudgery, hard work. Robota has cognates
quick The meanings of words change over time. But when a particular sense of a word falls out of general use, sometimes the old meaning sticks around in idiomatic and stock phrases. Such is the case with quick, which did not always mean fast, rapid. The word comes from the Old
lent [This seasonal post pulled from the Wordorigins.org archives was originally published in February 2021.] In the Christian liturgical calendar, Lent is the season of fasting prior to Easter. It’s an odd word to the modern ear and has nothing to do with lending anything. Rather, the name comes
curd / crud / cruddy Most Americans today only see curd in descriptions of cottage cheese, in the nursery rhyme Little Miss Muffet, or in the verb form to curdle. The word in its original sense referred to the soft, white solid formed when milk or cream coagulates, but it has acquired additional senses over
pork / pork barrel It’s something of a cliché to say that English words for domesticated animals come from Old English while the words for various types of meat come from Norman French, as the English-speaking commoners cared for the animals and the French-speaking nobility ate the meat. It’s a gross simplification,
artificial intelligence / AI Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the capacity of computers to perform tasks that were previously thought impossible for machines, that is to mimic human thought processing either for specific tasks or in general. The term appears in the 1950s. More recently, the term generative artificial intelligence has come in to
