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A collection of 132 posts

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auld lang syne

What should be a straightforward history is muddled by an incompetent 19th century editor

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Santa Claus

(I’m reposting some older, seasonal articles on the feed’s off days. This article was first published on Wordorigins.org on 13 December 2023.) The name Santa Claus is a dialectal variation on the Dutch Sint Klaas. The Sint, or Sante in the Dutch dialect of early New York,

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Boxing Day

(I’m reposting some older, seasonal articles on the feed’s off days. This article was first published on Wordorigins.org on 20 December 2023.) Boxing Day is 26 December, the day after Christmas. It is celebrated in Britain and many of the Commonwealth countries, including Canada, but not in

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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yule

Bede: tripping up scholars for over a thousand years

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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.

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Black Friday / Cyber Monday

(I’m reposting some older, seasonal articles on the feed’s off days. This article was first published on Wordorigins.org on 21 November 2023.) In the United States, the Friday after Thanksgiving is known as Black Friday. The day is the traditional start of the holiday shopping season and

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Thanksgiving

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tacit

Tacit is an adjective that denotes something that is silently or wordlessly understood. It’s etymology is quite straightforward, a borrowing from the Latin tacitus, the past participle of the verb tacere, meaning to be silent. Thomas Eliot’s 1538 dictionary records the Latin. Early dictionaries like this one included

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neon

Neon is a chemical element, a noble gas, with atomic number 10 and the symbol Ne. It was discovered in 1898 by William Ramsay and Morris W. Travers, who named it after the Greek νέον (new). Neon has a small number of applications, the most well known of which is,

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lunatic-fringe

As commonly used today, a lunatic fringe is an extremist minority in a movement or group. But that’s not its original meaning. The earliest uses of the phrase deprecatingly refer to a woman’s hairstyle, one where the hair is cut straight across the forehead, that is to say,

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tacit (paid)

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SWAT / swatting

SWAT is a US police acronym of the phrase Special Weapons and Tactics. A SWAT team is a paramilitary police unit trained and equipped to engage in situations where violence was expected, such as hostage situations and drug raids. According to Mitchel P. Roth’s Historical Dictionary of Law Enforcement,

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moscovium

Moscovium is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 115 and the symbol Mc. It is extremely radioactive, its longest-lived isotope has a half-life of less than a second. It has no applications other than pure research. Element 115 was first synthesized in 2003 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear

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neon (paid)

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bachelor

This word for an unmarried man has had several meanings over the centuries. Bachelor is borrowed from Anglo-Norman bacheler, which is presumably from the Latin baccalaria, a division of land. The normal sound changes would lead us to conclude that the French is from the form baccalaris, but that form

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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