List of All Articles with Tag 'etymology'

Americans favor 'Merry Christmas,' while Brits opt for 'Happy Christmas.' Here's how we got here.

The origin of ‘towhead’ has roots in 14th-century England, when ‘tow’ often referred to textile fibers.

What is a placebo? Technically, a Latin phrase meaning ‘I will please.’ It’s also a Catholic prayer and a clever insult.

When talking about the fundament, some terms have slipped through the crack of lexical history—so please enjoy these old and enjoyable terms for the hindquarters.

One theory suggests that we call liquor 'spirits' because of alcohol’s association with one spirit in particular: the Holy Spirit. But there are other theories.

If you were an 18th-century settler in Australia with no knowledge of marsupials, you just might decide to call a koala a ‘bear,’ right?

‘Avocado’ comes to us from Nahuatl—and it doesn’t mean what you might think it means.

Nowadays, we use jones to express an intense craving for something. But it used to refer specifically to drugs.

From the courts to the morgue, if the government doesn't know someone's name or wants to withhold it, they give them one of these as a placeholder. Why?

Fall is here, and you're getting hungry. Feast on this cornucopia of etymologies for seasonal veggies straight from the garden.

By the late 1700s, laborers adopted the insult to refer to workers who wouldn’t join a strike, a union, or take part in organized labor and undermined their fellow workers.

To paraphrase Krusty the Clown, comedy isn’t dirty words—it’s words that sound dirty. Here are 50 of them.