Word of the Week

Word history and etymology

Word of the Week – Biblioklept
You know the people. The ones you've learned not to lend books to because they always forget to return them. The ones who will swear they didn't have them or that they gave them back, even though you know that precious volume is right there on their shelves. Or...
Word of the Week – Obey
So here's the nutshell. Obey literally means "listen to." Makes sense, right? Because to obey someone is, well, to listen to what they tell you to do. As in, to do it. Simple. Except, just looking at the word, you probably don't actually see the root words in there,...
Word of the Week – Book
Book. It's one of those words so integral to my very life that I've never really paused to look it up. Oh, I've looked up the history of the things we call books, don't get me wrong. I've learned about how they evolved from scrolls to codexes to the bound paper we...
Word of the Week – Library
The Collector of Burned Books releases tomorrow!! I'm super stoked...and thought in honor of this book all about the historic Library of Burned Books in Paris, we'd take a look at the history of the word library. I've long known that library has liber (book) as its...

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”!