Word of the Week

Word history and etymology

Word of the Week – Scorcher
Is it getting hot where you live? Maybe so hot you'd call it a scorcher? At first glance, you might not think that scorcher really needs a closer look. It obviously comes from the word scorch, meaning "to burn." Which is true. But did you know that it's been used to...
Word of the Week – Muggy
I live in the Appalachians--a place with so many shades of green that a friend who moved here from Colorado reported she'd never seen so many in her life, LOL. But all those trees and plant life means something else, too. It means we have a lot of humidity in the air,...
Word of the Week – SPF
SPF might not seem terribly mysterious. Anyone who wears sunblock is accustomed to seeing the abbreviation, and it's no mystery what it stands for "Sun Protection Factor." But did you know that the first sunblock was not, in fact, created for sunny summer days? Nope!...
Word of the Week – Recruit
Ever wonder why we don't cruit, but we cruit again (recruit)? Maybe you don't, LOL. But as I was driving along the road a few weeks ago and saw text on the back of a tractor trailer that was wearing off, it got me to wondering. What's the root of this word, where we...

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”!