Word of the Week

Word history and etymology

Word of the Week – Queen
Last week we explored the word wife, but it's so closely linked to queen that I had to look into this word next! Queen traces its roots back to the original Indo-European word gwen, which means...you guessed it..."woman." Just like wife. In ancient Germanic languages,...
Word of the Week – Wife
Since last week we looked at the origins of husband, obviously this week we need to look at where the word wife comes from! Wife, originally spelled wif  or wyf, is from Old English and meant "woman." By late Old English it had carried the idea of "married woman," but...
Word of the Week – Husband
The word husband has been in English since, well, the days of Old English. That's not exactly surprising. But even in words this old and common, there's still something to be learned when we look at the roots! Our modern English word comes from the Old English...
Word of the Week – Moon
We talk a lot at Word of the Week about words that are shockingly new or have interesting roots. Well, moon is neither of those things. 😉 But it's still a fascinating word to study, because of its ancient, ANCIENT history. It's no great surprise that the biggest...

Have you ever wondered when certain words started to be used in certain ways? Or how they even came about? If they’re related to other, similar-sounding words?

I wonder these things all the time. And so, for years I’ve been gathering interesting words together, looking at the etymology, and posting them in fun, bite-sized posts called Word of the Week. Here you’ll find everything from which definition of a word pre-dates another, to how certain holiday words came about, to what the original meaning was of something we use a lot today but in a very different way. And of course, the surprising words that we think are new but in fact are pretty ancient, like “wow”!