Quotes About Etymology

If you like Anglo-Saxon, I belched. If you fancy Latin, I eructed.

the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.

He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language. How book branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue. How beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters.

The eighth verse of Genesis 1 reads: "And God called the expanse heaven." Rashi here endeavors to explain the word for heaven, Shamayim. He says that it may consist of the following: either the words Sa and Mayim, meaning "carrying water;" the words Sham and Mayim, meaning "there is water;" or the words Esh and Mayim, meaning "fire and water.

Etymologically, the word time comes from tide—an ancient reference to the lunar cycle still retained in such expressions as "yuletide" and "good tidings.

The name Wisconsin is believed by some to be a derivation of the word Wishkonsing, place of the beaver.)

You may find it interesting that the word Solomon is comprised of three smaller words—the Latin 'sol,' the Hindu 'om,' and the Egyptian 'on'—all of which mean sun in their respective language.

Our word "Phoenician" comes from ancient Greek. Phoinikes, "red people," was what the Greeks called them, probably in reference to their copper skin color.

The gh at the end of many modern words, however, like dough, cough, and trough, is actually an artifact not of Dutch orthographic tendencies, but of Norman distaste for the Middle English letter yogh, which looked like this: 3. Yogh fell out of use around the end of the fifteenth century.

las palabras nunca son fruto del azar. Que todas tienen un pasado, una especie de genética que las delata. —Eso es lo que estudia la etimología...

The Gaulish language ended up contributing very little to the vocabulary of modern French. Only about a hundred Gaulish words survived the centuries, mostly rural and agricultural terms such as bouleau (birch), sapin (fir), lotte (monkfish), mouton (sheep), charrue (plow), sillon (furrow), lande (moor) and boue (mud)—that's eight percent of the total. However, Gaulish is still relatively well-known, partly because it left many place and family names in northern France.

word ciao comes from. (If you must know, it's an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval Venetians as an intimate salutation: Sono il suo schiavo! Meaning: "I am your slave!")

The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally "a walled garden.

Why is S-A-S pronounced S-A-W? It should be Ar-Kansas. Did Kansas object?

The word "charm" comes from the Latin carmen, a song, but also an incantation tied to the casting of a magical spell.

we know that Francis Brewster coined E, es, and em in 1841, and Charles Crozat Converse announced thon and thons in 1884, though he may have invented his common-gender pronouns as early as 1858.

The English word "coral" also comes from Greek, meaning "what becomes hard in the hand," "the maiden or nymph of the sea," or "the heart of the sea.

Je ne manquai pas de rappeler que notre "paradis" avait pour origine un vieux mot persan, "paradaeza", qui veut dire "jardin

For the benefit of those half-dozen people who will see a name like Gwillim and put this book down in order to go look it up to see where it comes from — it is the Welsh version of William

Anglo-Saxon tends not to lend itself to long and elaborate words that have strung together three or four affixes to create a rhetorical term for a very obscure thing. While

The first recorded use to date of OMG is from 1917, and reads in full "I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis—O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)—Shower it on the Admiralty!" The citation comes from a letter by one John Arbuthnot Fisher, who happens to have been the admiral in charge of the British navy (a position known as first sea lord), and was written to Winston Churchill, staunch defender of both the English people and their language.

In just the first letter of the OED you will find words as magnificent as agathokakological (composed of good and evil), as delicately shaded as addubitation (the suggestion of doubt), and as odd as antithalian (opposed to fun or festivity). I

Foreplead (v.) To ask too much in pleading. You are pleading when you ask for your job back; you are forepleading when you ask for a raise to go with it. Fornale

Apricity (n.) the warmth of the sun in winter. A strange a lovely word. The OED does not give any citation for its use except for Henry Cockeram's 1623 "English Dictionarie". Not to be confused with "apricate" (to bask in the sun), although both come from the Latin "apricus", meaning exposed to the sun.