Quotes About Etymology

In English Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are named after the Germanic gods Tiw, Woden, Thunor and Frig.

an excellent man, with whom I am sorry now that I did not converse more often, for, even if he cared nothing for the arts, he knew a great many etymologies)

Etgar means "challenge." And my family name is Keret, which means "urban." So my name is "urban challenge." My joke is, it's a good description of a birth but a strange name for a human being.

Side note: invalid. Whoever invented that word, and made it the same word as not-valid? That person sucked.

Of all the words that exist in any language only a bare minority are pure, unadulterated, original roots. The majority are "coined" words, forms that have been in one way or another created, augmented, cut down, combined, and recombined to convey new needed meanings, The language mint is more than a mint; it is a great manufacturing center, where all sorts of productive activities go on unceasingly.

The author gives an interesting naval etymology of the word "opportunity". It referred to days in which sailing ships had to wait outside a port for the appropriate tide, which then was their chance until the next tide.

The word aerobics comes from two Greek words: aero, meaning "ability to," and bics, meaning "withstand tremendous boredom

It was giving me the etymology of the gesture as I sat down. You would think a SecUnit who had been shot to pieces multiple times, blown up, memory purged, and once partially dismantled by accident wouldn't be on the verge of panic under these circumstances. You'd be wrong.

La palabra «nostalgia» viene de la palabra compuesta griega nosto, que significa «ir a casa», y algos, que significa «dolor».

In fact, the modern word 'candidate' derives from the Latin candidatus, which means 'whitened' and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns, to impress the voters.

The Latin word for 'rams', rostra, became the name of the platform and gave modern English its word 'rostrum'.

The word 'sin' is derived from the Indo-European root 'es-,' meaning 'to be.' When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, 'to be' in the fullest sense is 'to sin'.

Taboo comes from a Polynesian word that means "sacred or holy" rather than simply "prohibited.

I just read them for fun." "Dictionaries?" "Yes." "That doesn't sound like fun. That sounds awful." "Awful used to mean 'full of awe.' The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary." He blinked. "See?" She said. "Fun.

Words derive their power from the original word.

Whilst a word like "impede" survived, its opposite, "expede," did not.

Old English 'æppel' used to mean any kind of fruit.

Noise harms your body and boils your brain. The word "noise" derives from the Latin word nausea.

The word "noise" is derived from the Latin word nausea.

22Fidalgo derives from filho d'algo—literally, the "son of somebody"—though it later became a generic term for nobility.

Etymology, n.: Some early etymological scholars come up with derivations that were hard for the public to believe. The term "etymology" was formed from the Latin "etus" ("eaten"), the root "mal" ("bad"), and "logy" ("study of"). It meant "the study of things that are hard to swallow."

How come "burbled" gets to be in the Oxford English Dictionary but "tulgy" doesn't? Hm?

the Welsh name for 'England', Lloegr, meant 'the Lost Land', I fell for the fancy, imagining what a huge sense of loss and forgetting the name expresses. A learned colleague has since told me that my imagination had outrun the etymology. Yet as someone brought up in English surroundings, I never cease to be amazed that everywhere which we now call 'England' was once not English at all.

In Takeuchi's opinion, the word "spirit" is derived from the Latin word "spiro" (to breathe).