Detail of Bayeux Tapestry: Norman cavalry attacking an English fort. Image by Myrabella, 2013, licensed under Creative Commons.

Welcome to Wordorigins.org

April 17, 2024

And we’re on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Post too.

You can also follow the site on Mastodon, and on Post, and on Bluesky.

I am no longer posting on the site formerly known as Twitter.

Latest posts:

Coming soon:

nobelium
jabroni
ham
oganesson
cat’s pajamas / meow / whiskers
spaghettify / spaghettification
zirconium / zircon / hyacinth
creek / up shit’s creek
bee’s knees

Wordorigins.org focuses on word and phrase origins and the history of the English language, but from time to time expands into discussions about language in general. The site primarily deals with English and those languages that have influenced the development of the English language.*

There are three main areas of the site:

the Big List that details the origin and history of specific words and phrases
the Harmless Drudge blog where I discuss concepts about language in general
and the Discussion Forums, where you can contribute.

This site takes a different approach than dictionaries and many other historical linguistics sites do. Instead of simply supplying the etymological roots of words and providing a few short examples of how they have been used over the centuries, when I provide examples of how words and phrases have been used, I extract much longer passages, sometimes several paragraphs, of surrounding text to provide a fuller context of how and where the word or phrase appears. I have found that the brief clippings given in dictionaries, while perfectly adequate to illustrate the use of the term, often elide fascinating and important insights into our past and how our present came to be.

Language is the creation of us all. You might say that language is the original crowd-sourced tool. As such, it is a reflection of who we are and where we come from. Embedded in the English language is a history of great works of literature—both canonical and from less-often-read writers—and ennobling acts and concepts. But also embedded in it is a history of racism, enslavement, colonialism, and sexism. What we see in that reflection isn’t always pretty, but the language that we speak, whether for good or for ill, is central to our identities. It shows the best and the worst in us, who we truly are.

I hope you enjoy the site, which has been going since 1997. And feel free to let me know what you like and dislike about it, to correct any errors you find, and to engage in the discussion more broadly. You can do this via email dave@wordorigins.org or via the discussion forums.

*It’s not that other languages aren’t important or interesting; it’s just that I’m a native speaker of English and trained in medieval English language and literature and don’t have the competence to address other languages in detail. Plus, tackling the history of any one language is a big enough job in and of itself.

—Dave Wilton

Reusing and Sharing Wordorigins.org material

December 29, 2020

The text portions of Wordorigins.org can be licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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New & Improved Wordorigins.org

May 8, 2020

8 May 2020

It looks different, but the changes are not simply cosmetic. I’ve made some significant changes “under the hood.” All the old content is still here, and the substantive changes are mainly in the discussion forums.

It’s now easier to join and post to the discussion forums. There’s a new Captcha system that will, hopefully, weed out the bots that attempt to spam the site. Additionally, I also must approve each new user’s first post.

While I’ve done the best I can at troubleshooting problems in advance, let me know if something doesn’t work or you encounter broken links.

I’m also engaged in updating and revising the older Big List entries, so you should start to see a steady stream of new and revised posts for various words and phrases. As part of this revision, I’m including much lengthier quotations, and not just the short snippets that you find in most dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary. Since this site is online, I have the luxury of not being constrained by the space limitations that ordinary dictionaries have. Also, I now have access, through Princeton University Library,* to a huge range of databases and materials that were previously unavailable to me. So, I can provide expanded versions of the quotations found in other dictionaries. My thinking here is that not only will the longer quotations provide a clearer understanding of exactly how a word or phrase was used, but the longer quotations place the terms in historical and cultural context, and are often just plain fun to read.

* = I mean no disrespect the other university libraries where I have worked—they have been excellent—but Princeton is simply awash with cash, and they use it to purchase access to an ungodly amount of material.