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Allergy:
The word allergy is an Americanism that came into our language from German. The German word was coined from the ancient Greek adjective allos, meaning "other", and a Greek word meaning "work" or "action". The combination was meant to give the idea of a reaction to a foreign substance.
Alphabet:
The ancient Greek word from which we get alphabet was formed from the words alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.
Ancestor:
From Old French, Middle English borrowed ancestre, which in turn is derived from the Late Latin antecessor. It meant literally, "one who goes before or in front". Thus our ancestors are those who went before us.
Assassin:
During the time of the Crusades the members of a certain secret Moslem sect terrorised their enemies by performing murders as a religious duty. Because these acts were carried out under the influence of hashish the killers became known as hashshashin, 'eaters or smokers of hashish'. From this we get the word assassin. Atlas: A book of maps came to be called an atlas because in earlier times this kind of book often had a drawing on its first page showing the mythical giant Atlas holding a globe of the earth on his shoulders.
Basketball:
Dr. James Naismith invented the game basketball at a college in Massachusetts in 1891. He used real peach baskets with their bottoms cut out. Hence the name basketball.
Bible:
The earliest books were actually rolls of papyrus, a writing material that was made from the pith of the papyrus plant and used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. The Greek word for papyrus was biblos or byblos, which they derived from the name of the Phoenician city byblos [now Jubayl, Lebanon] from which is derived the word bible.
Brandy:
In the early seventeenth century, brandy was called brandwine or brandewine which were derived from the Dutch word brandewijn, earlier brantwijn. This word meant "burnt wine", the wine that has been distilled over fire. Later it came to be known as brandywine which was shortened to brandy.
Bungalow:
This word was first used in English by the British in India. It comes from the Hindi noun bangla, meaning "a thatched hut" ; the basic meaning of bangla,as an adjective, is 'of Bengal', a region in north- eastern India. Small one-storey houses, often with a wide porch, are common in that region.
Camera:
The source of camera is a latin word that means "a room" or "a chamber". The full name of the device for taking pictures was originally camera obscura, meaning "dark chamber". Today this name has been shortened to camera.
Cancer:
The Latin word cancer, whose literal meaning is `crab', is also the name of a number of maladies, including malignant tumors. Greek karkinos has the same double meaning. The word owes its extended sense to the vague resemblance of the swollen veins that surround a cancer to the legs of a crab sticking out from its shell. The Latin word was borrowed into Old English and should in time have yielded a modern English cancher. Cancer was reborrowed from Latin in the fourteenth century.
Chocolate:
Chocolate comes to us, through French, from the Spanish word chocolate, which refers to a drink or other food made of a mixture of cocoa seeds and certain other seeds. The Spanish word was borrowed from the Aztecs' word for this, chokolatl.
Cigar:
Cigar was borrowed from Spanish cigarro, which has the same meaning. Cigarro is thought to have been borrowed from the verb sicar, which means "to smoke rolled tobacco leaves" in the Mayan language.
Cobra:
When the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama landed his fleet at Calicut, India, in 1498, the Portuguese became aware of, among other things, a venomous snake with the remarkable ability to expand the skin of its neck to form a hood. The Hindi word the Indians used for the snake was nag, but the Portuguese decided to rename it in their own language,cobra de capello, "hooded snake". The Portuguese name was borrowed into English in the seventeenth century. By the nineteenth century its name in English had become shortened to cobra.
Date:
The English word date, inspite of semantic and phonetic similarity, has nothing to do etymologically with day. Date comes to us, through Old French, from the Latin adjective data, meaning "given", which the ancient Romans used as the first word of a written message. It introduced the information about the place and time of writing. Data is a form of the past participle of the Latin verb dare, meaning "to give".
Denim:
The name of many a fabric is derived from the name of the place in which it was manufactured. Denim comes from the French de Nimes, meaning `of Nimes', originally used in the phrase serge de Nimes, which appeared in English in the seventeenth century as serge denim. Serge, from the Latin adjective sericus, `of silk', is a durable twilled fabric, and Nimes is a city of southern France where textiles are still an important industry.
Diamond:
The Greek and Latin for the hardest imaginable substance, whether applied to a legendary stone or an actual substance like diamond or steel, was adamas. Thus when diamonds became known to the Western world sometime around the beginning of the Christian era the Latin adamas was applied to them as well as other very hard substances. In Late Latin, however, the form diamas began to be used to distinguish diamonds from other substances included previously in the term adamas. Hence the name diamond.
Dollar:
In the mountains of northwestern Bohemia, just a few kilometers south of the East German-Czechoslovakian border, is the small town of Jachymov. In the sixteenth century, a silver mine was opened nearby and coins were minted to which the name joachimstaler was applied. In German this was shortened to taler. Shortly afterwards the Dutch or Low German form daler was borrowed into English to refer to the taler and other coins that were patterned after it. From this the word Dollar was adopted by the American Constitution as the money unit of United States of America.
Economy:
We get economy from the ancient Greek words oikos and nomos. Oikos means the rule of the household. To run a house well, a person must manage resources and expenses carefully. Hence the word economy.
Eskimo:
The word Eskimo came into English, probably through French, from Spanish esquimao. The original word, ayashkimew, came from a language spoken by a North American Indian people of eastern Quebec. The basic meaning is not known for certain; it may have been "makers of nets for snowshoes".
Etiquette:
Etiquette took its name from estiquer, `to stick or attach', a verb the French borrowed from Middle Dutch steken. Estiquet or etiquette, soon had several meanings in French. Etiquette is no longer confined to the high circles it began in but now includes the proper forms to be observed in any social situation.
Fanatic:
In Latin the adjective fanaticus was originally used to mean `of or relating to a temple', having been derived from the noun fanum, "temple". It was later used in reference to those pious individuals who were thought to have been inspired by a deity. In time the sense "frantic, frenzied, mad" arose because it was thought that persons behaving in such a manner were possessed by a deity. This last sense was the first meaning of the word fanatic.
Fiasco:
The Italian fiasco means`a glass bottle' and is related to the English flask. In English fiasco was first borrowed from Italian in this literal sense, referring especially to a long-necked, straw-covered bottle for wine. The French adopted the Italian fiasco into the phrase faire fiasco, meaning `to fail'. Fiasco was borrowed into English in the late nineteenth century in its newly acquired sense of an utter and often ridiculous failure. Just what prompted the development of the sense `failure' from `bottle' has remained obscure.
Gorgeous:
In the late Middle Ages, a standard article of feminine dress was the wimple, a cloth headdress that surrounded the neck and head, leaving only the face uncovered which was called a gorgias. An elegant and elaborate gorgias was so much the mark of a well-to-do and fashionable lady that gorgias became an adjective meaning `elegant' or `fond of dress'.The adjective passed into Middle English in the form gorgayse from which comes the word gorgeous.
Greenland:
More than 85 percent of this island is covered with ice, and only a small part of the land is ever green. But the Scandinavian people who were the first Europeans to visit it, about 1,000 years ago, wanted to attract settlers to it, and they knew that people would not want to live in ice and snow. They gave a very pretty, but a very false name in their own language that came into English as Greenland.
Gum:
The Old French name, gomme, came from Latin gummi.The Latin name was borrowed from ancient Greek kommi, which came from qmyt, the name of this substance in the language of ancient Egypt.
Gypsy/Gipsy:
In the early years of the sixteenth century there began to appear in Britain some members of a wandering race of people who were ultimately of Hindu origin and who called themselves and their language Romany. In Britain, however, it was popularly believed that they came from Egypt, and thus they were called Egipcyans. This soon became shortened to Gypcyans, and by the year 1600 the further altered form Gipsy.
Hamburger:
The hamburger, or "Hamburg steak", as it was once called, gets its name from the city of Hamburg in Germany. At first, the name meant only "ground beef". By the 1930's in the U.S.A., hamburger was also a word for the sandwich. Remember that the hamburger was not named after ham.
Hijack:
It is believed that hijack comes from the command "High, Jack!", a slangy way of telling the person being robbed to raise his arms into the air. Hijack is an Americanism.
Hippopotamus:
Hippopotamus was the name invented by the Greeks to describe the bulky, barrel-shaped animal that spends most of the day bathing in the rivers. The two elements of the word are hippos, `horse', and potomos, `river'. Infact, however, the hippopotamus is more closely related to the hog then to the horse.
Infant:
Latin infans means literally 'not speaking, incapable of speech'. In classical Latin the noun infans designated a very young child who had not yet learned to talk. But later infans became the most common word for any child, however talkative. In English the word infant which was borrowed from the French, was originally used as the French used enfant, for any child.
Island:
Island can be traced back to the Old English igland, composed of the two elements ig and land. Land, as we might expect, means 'land', but it is surprising to note that ig is found in Old English as a distinct word meaning 'island'. In a sense, then, we can interpret igland as 'island- land'. The 's' in the modern spelling of island can be accounted to the Old French word isle of the same meaning. In the sixteenth century we find the first appearance of such forms as isle-land, ysle-land, and island.
Jade:
Jade comes from the Spanish phrase , which means "stone of the side". In earlier times, people believed that holding a piece of this stone against the side of the body would prevent the pain of colic.
Juggernaut:
Jagannath, an avatar of the god Vishnu, means 'Lord of the World'. Some of the worshippers of Jagannath would allow themselves to be crushed beneath the wheels of the enormous carriage which drew his image in procession, although, probably as a result of accidents which inevitably occur in the process of celebration. The English form juggernaut began to be used in the nineteenth century in the sense of a massive inexorable force or object that crushes everything in its path.
Kamikaze:
In 1281, Kublai Khan sent an immense mongol fleet against Japan. After some weeks of inconclusive fighting, a great and sudden storm arose and destroyed the Mongol fleet. To the Japanese this salvation was kamikaze, 'divine wind'. In the Second World War Japan sent out pilots willing to give up their lives to help save their country by destroying American ships. These were the members of a special corps named kamikaze after the storm that had saved Japan some seven centuries earlier.
Lady:
The Old English word for lady was hlafdige. Hlaf meant 'loaf' and dige meant 'a kneader of bread' or 'a maid'. In the middle English a lady was called lavedi and then lafdi. Ultimately it was reduced to lady.
Legend:
The Latin verb legere originally meant 'to gather, collect'. In the course of time the verb came to be used in the sense 'to read'. In Medieval Latin the word legenda, the gerundive of legere, meaning literally 'a thing to be read', was used in specific reference to 'the story of the life of a saint'. In the twelfth century the French borrowed this word as legende with the same meaning, and in the fourteenth century the word became part of the English vocabulary. The less than fully historical character of many saints' legends led to a later sense that survives as 'a story handed down from early times by tradition and popularly regarded as historical although not entirely verifiable'.
Money and Mint:
One of the epithets of the goddess Juno, the wife of Jupiter in Roman mythology, was moneta. When the Romans established a mint at the temple of Juno Moneta, this epithet became a generic Latin term for a place where money is made. In Middle French, Latin moneta became moneie, which was then borrowed into Middle English in the form moneye. Mint is derived from Old English word mynet which is borrowed from Latin word moneta.
Nightmare:
Many people have assumed a connection between the second element -mare of nightmare and mare, meaning a female horse. Actually mare is another word found in Old English meaning `an evil spirit or an incubus thought to oppress people during sleep'. In the sixteenth century the meaning of nightmare extended to refer to a frightening or oppressive dream, probably from the belief or suggestion that such dreams were caused by evil spirits.
OK or okay:
There has been some controversy over the etymology of OK. One of the suggestions is that OK originated in the grading of woods used for furniture-the best oak being, of course, "Oak A." The explanation current in the early years of this century was that OK was probably of Choctaw origin, from oke, `it is', and hoke, `yes'. One of the suggestions is that, in the 1830's the abbreviation craze went so far to produce abbreviations of intentional misspellings.Hence, O.K.[oll korrect] followed quite naturally.
Phony:
The word phony comes from one of the secret words that British thieves and swindlers used. Their secret word for "a gilt ring" was fawney. They would sell a victim a gilt ring that they said was made of real gold. But the ring was not real or genuine gold, and the word phony came to be used in speaking of anything that is fake or not genuine.
Pigeon:
Some animal names, especially those of birds, have been created through onomatopoeia, or imitation of sound. The Romans used the noun pipio for a young bird from the sound of its shrill piping cries. In Middle French this became pijon, which was borrowed into Middle English as pigeon. Although pigeons generally coo, the young squab can be heard piping, especially when hungry.
Planet:
In studying the sky ancient astromers observed that there are a few heavenly bodies that seemed to move, or 'wander', compared to the stars that seemed to stay in the same place for a viewer on the earth. These heavenly objects were called by the Greeks asteres planetai,'wandering stars,' or simply planetai,'wanderers'. Late Latin borrowed the Greek term in the plural form planetae, the singular of which was planeta. Through Old French, Middle English borrowed this word to give us the modern planet.
Rifle:
The basic meaning of the Middle French rifler was 'to scratch or file'. But it was the extended sense 'to plunder' that Middle English borrowed with the word from the French. The word is still common in this sense today. But early in the seventeenth century, the French word was reborrowed into English in something closer to its original sense 'to scratch'.To rifle a gun was to cut spiral grooves into its bore. Rifle became a noun which named such a spiral groove.In the late eighteenth century, a gun with a rifled bore was itself called a rifle.
River:
Latin rivus is related to ripa, which means 'bank or a shore of a stream',and from which is derived the Old French rivere or riviere with a primary meaning of 'riverbank' or 'the land along a river'. It was also used, however, to refer to the water itself, and this is the source of English river.
Rhinoceros:
The name of this animal comes from two ancient Greek words that mean "nose" and "horn". A horn near the nose is one of the main features that identify a rhinoceros.
Sandwich:
The sandwich was named after the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, an English nobleman who lived in the 1700's. It is said that he ate his bread and meat together in this way so that he would not have to interrupt his card game in order to eat a regular meal.
School:
School is traced back to its Greek etymon schole meaning 'leisure'. Schole was first used in the sense of 'a place of learning' not until about 30 B.C. The Romans borrowed the Greek word as schola, with essentially the same meaning. Schola became scol in Old English about the year 1000 and denoted 'a place for instruction'. This word evolved into scole in Middle English and then into school.
Surgery:
A surgeon is a person who treats exclusively by working with his hands. Surgeon and surgery are derived ultimately from Greek cheirourgos, 'working with the hand', which is the compound formed from cheir, 'hand', and ergon, 'work'. This Greek word was borrowed into Latin as chirurgia. The modern word surgery is derived from Middle English surgerie which was a contraction of the Old French words serurgerie and cirurgerie.
Tank:
The army tank got its name because the government made its development and production a military secret. When workers put the parts for these vehicles into large boxes for shipment, they stamped "tank" or "tanks" on the boxes so that anyone who saw the labels would think that the boxes held containers of some kind. By the time the secret got out, the secret name for the vehicle had become its real name, tank.
Teddy bear:
President Theodore Roosevelt, whose nickname was Teddy, liked to hunt big game. A newspaper once printed a cartoon of him sparing the life of a bear cub. Then a toy company made a similar toy bear cub, which it called the teddy bear.
Typhoon:
The first typhoons reported in English were Indian storms and were called touffons or tufans. As Islam had become one of India's major religions, it was the Arabic tufan, a word for a violent flood or hurricane, that the English found in India and borrowed as touffons. Later, when English ships met violent storms in the neighborhood of the China Sea, Englishmen learnt the Cantonese word for a big wind 'taai fung'.The influence of taai fung explains the present altered sound and shape of typhoon.
Umbrella:
In Latin, umbella, the diminutive form of umbra, was used for 'a sunshade or parasol'. Our word umbrella, in use since the seventeenth century, is ultimately derived from this Latin diminutive by way of the Italian word ombrella.
Utopia:
In 1516 Sir Thomas More, the English humanist, published his book Utopia, in which the social and economic conditions of Europe are compared with those of an ideal society. That such an ideal state is unattainable in reality is implied by the name Utopia, which literally means 'no place', from Greek ou, 'not, no', plus topos, 'place'. In Modern English utopia has become a generic term for any place of ideal perfectoin, especially in laws, government, and social conditions.
Vaccine:
Vaccine comes from the Latin word vaccinus, meaning 'of or from cows'. At first, the word vaccine was used to mean only the kind of substance that was used to prevent smallpox and was made from a mild virus of a disease of cows. Now the word is used for any substance that works in the same way against a disease.
Weird:
Weird comes from an Old English noun wyrd, meaning 'fate'.The earliest meaning of weird in Modern English is "having to do with fate or destiny". Fate cannot be explained, and therefore is mysterious. The idea of mystery or strangeness is all that remains today of the original meaning of this word.
Xmas:
Since the sixteenth century Xmas has been used in English as an abbreviation for Christmas. X as a symbol for Christ derives from the Greek where chi [X] is the initial letter of Christos, the Greek form of Christ.
Yacht:
In the sixteenth century the Dutch began building light, fast-moving ships designed to chase the ships of pirates and smugglers away from the Dutch coast. The Dutch called this vessel jaght, which is a derivative of the Middle Low German word for a fast, light sailing vessel, jachtschiff, meaning literally 'hunting ship'. These were later called yacht.
Zany:
In the sixteenth century, one of the stock characters of the Italian theater was a subordinate fool, clown, acrobat, or mountebank who mimics ludicrously the tricks of his principal. In Italian the stock name for such a character is Zanni, which is a dialect nickname derived from the name Giovanni, the Italian form of John. By the early seventeenth century in English zany had become generalised to mean 'anyone who makes a laughing stock of himself to amuse others', and from this developed the adjectival sense of 'ludicrous' or 'mildly crazy'. Modern dictionaries define zany as 'comical in a crazy way' or 'strange, eccentric, crazy, whacky'.
Now, could you think of a better word to define your favourite zine?
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