Etymology is the term that refers to the study of the origins of words, including how they got their meanings and how words develop throughout history. Some of these words have lasted over a mind-blowing 15,000 years, like “thou” (the singular form you “you”), ”I” and “mother” and have been dubbed “ultraconserved words” by scientists.
But the English language is not finite; on the contrary, it keeps growing at quite an impressive pace. According to Global Language Monitor, around 5,400 new words are created every year; it’s only the 1,000 or so deemed to be in sufficiently widespread use that make it into print.
And while we use words every day without thinking, it’s incredible how little we really know about them. So in order to dive deep into some of them that we take for granted, we look at this illuminating Ask Reddit thread which shares some of the most interesting and surprising word origin stories.
#1
The word "bear" in many languages in europe (including English) just means "brown thing". There used to be a proper name for bear, but it was taboo because saying it was believed to summon a bear, who would then kill everyone. It was so taboo it was eventually forgotten and the euphamism (brown thing) became the name.
Ancient people were scared pissless by bears.
The Arctic draws its root from arctus, greek for bear. So its the "land of bears"
The Antarctic is thus, "the land without bears"
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398points
#2
The word "quintessential" has one of my favorite etymologies.
You can break it down into "quint" and "essential." Quint as in "five." "Essential" as in "essence," or "element." To be quintessential is to be the fifth element of something. To be the thing's *spirit*.
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349points
#3
Wow, good timing. I just learned this one today.
Etymology of the word **clue**: The word clue originates with the myth of Theseus, who used a ball of yarn to find his way back out of the minotaur's labyrinth. The middle English word for a ball of yarn was clew (or clewe); when the myth was popularized in England by Chaucer, people started using the word clew figuratively to mean a hint or guide to solving a problem.
Etymology of the word **clue**: The word clue originates with the myth of Theseus, who used a ball of yarn to find his way back out of the minotaur's labyrinth. The middle English word for a ball of yarn was clew (or clewe); when the myth was popularized in England by Chaucer, people started using the word clew figuratively to mean a hint or guide to solving a problem.
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339points
In order to find out more about how etymologists study the origins of words, as well as how words are made, Bored Panda reached out to Dr. Andreea Calude, the associate dean postgraduate for ALPSS (Division of Arts, Law, Psychology and Social Sciences) and senior lecturer in linguistics at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Dr. Calude researches various aspects of language, especially language on social media.
Dr. Calude explained that “language historians study language change by looking meticulously across many language vocabularies to track regular sound changes and sound correspondences and identify cognate classes, that is words and concepts which are inherited with (small or negligible or at least traceable) sound changes.”
#4
English used to have a letter called “thorn” which kind of looked like the letter “y”.
It made a buzzing “th” sound like in “the”. It’s why you see signs like “Ye Olde Shoppe”. It’s pronounced “The old shop”, not “Ye old shop”.
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330points
#5
Etymology: Dashboard
The dashboard is a board on the front of a horse carriage meant to keep mud from kicking up on the passengers when the horse dashes.
And over time it came to mean the front part of anything, even a computer interface is sometimes called a dashboard.
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268points
#6
Etymology: melon- not particularly interesting in itself, it came from Ancient Greek, through Latin, to Old French, before finding its way to English. All along the way it referred to various gourds. However, and this is the interesting bit, melons was slang for boobs in Greek, and it retained this slang definition as well as its “real” definition all the way to English. Usually in etymology you keep one definition or the other, and never both, which makes it really interesting. Also boobies.
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244points
“They compile databases to document these findings, and often share the data with open access so that anyone can look up such histories. Here is one compiled by my colleagues on the Austronesian language family,” Dr. Calude explained. She added that these databases are rich sources which combine meticulous linguistic expertise and document our linguistic past.
#7
The word "panic" comes from the Greek god Pan who had a blood-curdling scream that induced panic in anyone who heard it.
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244points
#8
The word oxymoron: the word oxymoron itself, appropriately enough, is an oxymoron. The oxy– part (the same as in words like oxygen, paroxysm and peroxide) comes from the Greek word for “sharp” or “acrid”, oxys. The –moron part (the same as in—well, moron) comes from the Greek word for “dull”, moros. So an oxymoron is literally a “sharp-dull” turn of phrase.
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232points
#9
Etymology: the word helicopter is a compound word derived from "**helico**" meaning roughly "spiral thing" and "**pter**" meaning roughly "flying thing". As in pterodactyl.
The compound word is helico-pter, not heli-copter like everyone thinks.
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224points
When asked how words are born/made, Dr. Calude said that “old" words are essentially forms which are passed down, in a modified form, from one parent-language (we call these proto-languages or ancestor languages) to another (daughter-language).
“Imagine a language keeps the original form from its ancestor language, then this form may be modified slightly and then it might be replaced by a new form or modified and passed on to the next daughter language. If the form is retained, then we end up with 'fossilized' word forms which we call cognates.”
#10
A little late to this thread but my favorite one isn't on here yet.
**Mortgage**
"Mort" - Death
"Gage" - Pledge
"Death Pledge", very fitting for a 30 year loan.
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223points
#11
The phrase "hands down" comes from horseracing and refers to a jockey who is so far ahead that he can afford drop his hands and loosen the reins (usually kept tight to encourage a horse to run) and still easily win.
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222points
#12
Etymology: The word “avocado” comes from the Aztec word for testicle. That’s literally the only one I can think of right now.
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176points
Dr. Calude gave an example: “in the Proto-Central-Pacific, the word for five is ‘lima’, which in many daughter languages has stayed the same or been slightly modified. In Hawaiian, Fijian and Tokelauan it is the same: ‘lima’, in Māori, Raratongan and Tahitian it is ‘rima’. The sound change from [l] to [r] is well-documented and historical linguists use regular sound changes like that to track language genealogies for hundreds and thousands of years of evolution.”
#13
The word “barbarian” comes from an Ancient Greek word referring to all non-Greek speakers (including Egyptians, Phoenicians, etc.) This was because to the Greeks, all other languages sounded like people saying “bar bar bar”. This became the root for the word βάρβαρος (bárbaros), which roughly means “babble” or “gibberish”.
It was later adopted by the Romans to refer to any culture that did not practice Greek or Roman traditions (even though Latin-speakers were technically classified as barbarians because they didn’t speak Greek). Due to good old xenophobia, it eventually came to mean “uncivilized”, and from there it made its way through the centuries into Middle English.
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173points
#14
Utopia.
I think there is a fairly common misconception that this word means 'good place', possibly because the first part of the word sounds similar to happy words like euphoria / eudaemonia etc. The word was in fact coined by Thomas Moore, and etymologically comes from the Greek 'ou' and 'topos', which literally translates to 'no place', or 'nowhere'. I just like that the unattainability of utopia is built into the word itself.
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169points
#15
Sailing terminology is everywhere:
"Taken aback" - This happens to a ship when the wind shifts and the sails are suddenly blown backward into the sailors' faces. The ship loses forward momentum.
"Learning the ropes" - when a new sailor literally learns which rope is connected to which part of the ship.
"Boarding" - Literally getting onto the boards of another ship. We still use this one to describe getting onto an airplane, when very few of them have any wooden parts.
Keeping things on an "even keel" - The keel is the lowermost part of a ship's hull. It's the part that runs down the middle and cuts through the water. Sailors want an even keel so that the ship stays on a smooth and steady course. Nowadays the term is used for any situation where people want to keep things smooth and steady.
"Limey" - Used as a semi-derogatory nickname for British sailors, who used limes and/or lime juice to prevent scurvy at sea. Nowadays it's a semi-derogatory nickname for all British people.
"groggy" - Grog was a mixture of rum and water that sailors drank. If you were groggy, you were either drunk on grog or hung over from the grog the night before. Nowadays we use it to describe being tired and fuzzy-headed.
"loose cannon" - Literally when a cannon wasn't secured in place and started crashing into things. Cannons were heavy pieces of solid iron with wheels, and if they weren't secured, they could roll/slide across a ship's deck whenever the ship leaned from side to side, and they could do some major damage to the ship and to the sailors. Nowadays this term describes a person who is unpredictable and likely to do damage wherever they go.
Terminology from old horse carriages is everywhere too:
"dashboard" - There was literally a board in front of the carriage driver to protect him from mud and gravel that "dashed" up against it from the horses' hooves. Now we use the word to describe any surface covered in controls, including on computer screens.
"hold your horses" - Self-explanatory, you hold the reins of the horses to slow them down.
Terminology from old machines:
to be "keyed up" or "wound up" - Referring to old clocks and clockwork machines that you sometimes had to wind up with a key.
"hanging up" a phone - Old phones, you had to hang up the earpiece when you were done.
"fired up" - Referring to steam engines, now people use it to refer to people being full of energy or starting up a piece of technology (whether it uses fire or not).
"upper case" and "lower case" - The individual metal letters used in a printing press were kept in cases - smaller letters in the lower case so they were in easy reach, larger letters in the upper case because they weren't used as much.
"stereotype" - This was a word used for identical copies of the same document, from the same printing press. Now we use it when we describe characteristics that we think are identical across whole social groups.
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145points
However, it is impossible to know which are THE oldest words, but we have some ideas where to look for them, Dr. Calude argues. “We suspect they might be everyday words, what we call basic vocabulary which languages have because it is important to discuss such concepts and which languages resist borrowing from other languages (because it is indeed so basic), for example words like mother, sun, mountain, number words like one, two and three, and color words like green and red, but also more grammatical words like that and pronouns like I and you,” she concluded.
#16
The etymology of "tawdry" is a real ride.
There was a 7th century Anglo-Saxon saint named Æthelthryth. Now, nobody, not even 7th century Anglo-Saxons, wants to go around trying to pronounce that dense forest of th's, so she was commonly known as St. Etheldreda, and later, linguistically lazier people called her St. Audrey.
St. Audrey was the patron saint of a town called Ely, and the folks of Ely held a fair every year in her name. One of the primary products on offer at these fairs was lace. "St. Audrey's lace" was said a few too many times, and got slurred down to "tawdry lace."
Over time, the lace fell out of favor. It was mainly made by peasant women, and thus viewed as cheap, and the Puritans looked down on lace garments of any kind as ostentatious. "Tawdry" then began to be used to describe other things that were cheap and ostentatious, and the modern definition of the word was born.
tl;dr: "Tawdry" comes from the fact that Æthelthryth is really hard to pronounce.
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139points
#17
Etymology: Nimrod was originally a compliment referring to one's hunting skills (Nimrod being a biblical figure known for his ability to hunt), but the definition changed because people didnt understand Bugs Bunny was calling Elmer Fudd a Nimrod *sarcastically*
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138points
#18
Etymology: Nightmare. The “mare” part of the word “nightmare” comes from Germanic folklore, in which a “mare” is an evil female spirit or goblin that sits upon a sleeper’s chest, suffocating them and/or giving them bad dreams. So basically the word comes from a description of sleep paralysis.
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135points
#19
In French the phrase “lion teeth” is “dent de lion”. A long time ago someone saw a flower and thought its petals looked like lion’s teeth, so they called it the dent de lion.
Dent de lion = Dandelion.
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113points
#20
Etymology: Why do we raise chickens (animal) to eat chicken (meat) but raise cows (animal) to eat... beef (meat)? Because in England, French used to be the preferred language of the court, whereas Welsh was commonly used by the, well, commoners. The Welsh word for cow, cwe, was pronounced "coo", and the French word for the meat from said animal was boeuf, pronounced "buf". Poor people raised "coos" so rich people could eat "buf". (Chickens weren't widely eaten by the upper classes until much later.)
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109points