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A collection of 132 posts

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,

22 Dec 2024 3 min read

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

21 Dec 2024 4 min read

Father Christmas

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

19 Dec 2024 1 min read

Christmas / Xmas

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

17 Dec 2024 2 min read

Scrooge / screw

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

14 Dec 2024 5 min read

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

14 Dec 2024 2 min read

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

10 Dec 2024 1 min read

yule

Bede: tripping up scholars for over a thousand years

07 Dec 2024 2 min read

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.

05 Dec 2024 2 min read

Black Friday / Cyber Monday

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

24 Nov 2024 7 min read

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Thanksgiving

23 Nov 2024 3 min read

Drawing of 3 men with sickles bending over and harvesting wheat being supervised by a standing man holding two staffs

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

11 Mar 2024 3 min read

Photo of a busy city street at night, brightly lit by neon and other lights

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,

08 Mar 2024 2 min read

Black-and-white photo of a museum gallery with modern art paintings on the walls and a sculpture in the middle of the room

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,

06 Mar 2024 5 min read

Drawing of 3 men with sickles bending over and harvesting wheat being supervised by a standing man holding two staffs

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tacit (paid)

04 Mar 2024 3 min read

Photo of police in camouflage uniforms and helmets standing near two armored vehicles

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,

04 Mar 2024 3 min read

A young man standing in front of an onion-domed cathedral (St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow); a crowd is milling about

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

01 Mar 2024 2 min read

Photo of a busy city street at night, brightly lit by neon and other lights

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neon (paid)

01 Mar 2024 2 min read

Movie poster for 1947’s The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. Image Shirley Temple embracing a confused Cary Grant.

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

28 Feb 2024 3 min read

Black-and-white photo of a museum gallery with modern art paintings on the walls and a sculpture in the middle of the room

Paid-members only

lunatic-fringe (paid)

28 Feb 2024 5 min read

Photo of police in camouflage uniforms and helmets standing near two armored vehicles

Paid-members only

SWAT / swatting (paid)

26 Feb 2024 3 min read

Calendar for February 2024, including February 29

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

26 Feb 2024 3 min read

A young man standing in front of an onion-domed cathedral (St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow); a crowd is milling about

Paid-members only

moscovium (paid)

23 Feb 2024 2 min read

A crystal of silvery metal next to a gray cube

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

23 Feb 2024 2 min read

Valkyrie

Words disappear from the language all the time. The concepts they represent become less useful or they are replaced by spiffier, newer terms and fade into obscurity and eventual disappearance from all but the largest of historical dictionaries. But occasionally these words are plucked from the fields of the slain

21 Feb 2024 2 min read

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