Word of the Week

Ever wonder how two very different meanings get attached to the same word? Cobbler is a perfect example. Historically, a cobbler is someone who mends shoes and has been such since the late 1300s. Cobbler and cobble (the verb) seem to have evolved together in English,...

Thanks to how similar travesty sounds to tragedy, I think I was always laboring under some false ideas about this one...especially because it often is a tragedy when something is also a travesty. Travesty, however, comes from the Latin and Italian words that mean "to...

I've shared before about the real meaning of passion and how its word actually means "suffering"--so the things we're passionate about are the things we're willing to suffer for. Well in a church conversation recently, my husband wondered aloud whether patience--which...

A while back, my husband and I were wondering how habit and habitat were related. Clearly they share a root, but what's the common idea between them? Well, we were wondering it at bedtime, so I didn't immediately go and look it up, but eventually I remembered to. ;-)...

I absolutely love getting notes from readers, especially when they're about word usages...even if they tell me I'm using something incorrectly, LOL. I make mistakes just like anybody, of course, but when someone points something out to me, I immediately go and look it...

This week and next, I'm going to be highlighting a couple words that readers brought up with me. This first one, kudos, led to a great conversation and a delightful new friendship (hi, Pat!). You just never know what may happen when two word-nerds meet! 😉 I actually...

Let me start by saying that gyroscopes are cool. Right? I've always been intrigued and impressed by the mechanics of them. Circles and spheres working with gravity...yep, very cool indeed. Now let's jump to the county fair last summer, which didn't run entirely thanks...

In The Nature of a Lady, my heroine, Lady Elizabeth "Libby" Sinclair, is a naturalist. She not only loves nature--as in, being out in it and enjoying it--she loves studying nature. Her most prized possession is a microscope, and she spends much of her holiday on St....

So here's the nutshell version: dreckly is just the Cornish way of saying "directly." The end. Shortest post in history. 😉 Okay, so a liiiiittle bit more. The word directly has of course been in the English language for a good long time. In the 1300s, it meant...

Whenever I write a book set in a region with a dialect (or even a language) all its own, I love to look up endearments and slang unique to them. I first looked up Cornish words when I wrote A Name Unknown, set near Land's End in Cornwall. Well, I got to dust off that...

In the weeks surrounding the release of The Nature of a Lady, I thought it would be fun to take a look at some words that appear in the book. We're going to start by looking at a few of the Cornish slang words that make an appearance. =) And given that my heroine is a...

Words that Shakespeare Coined Did you know that gloom was originally a verb? Yeah, neither did I. 😉 It's apparently a Scottish word that originally meant "to look sullen or displeased," dating from the 14th century. Well, in the late 1500s, Shakespeare got ahold of...

Words that Shakespeare Coined Elbow. No, not the noun. 😉 That one has obviously been around for a while...from around 1200, as a matter of fact, in Old English. El is the length of the forearm, and bow comes from boga, which means "arch." Shakespeare, however, was...

Words that Shakespeare Coined Dauntless. To understand the evolution of this word, we actually have to begin with daunt. This verb dates to the 14th century, taken from French (which is taken from Latin), meaning "to subdue or tame." It was a word generally used for...

This week begins a fun series on words that Shakespeare coined! The words themselves may or may not have a lot of interesting etymology otherwise...but they're making this list simply because they were introduced to us by the Bard. 😉 Cold-hearted is one such word,...

Scavenge and scavenger are another example of words whose progression surprised me. Back-formations do that to me a lot. 😉 I guess I always assumed the verb came first--first there was scavenging and then the one who did it became known as a scavenger. Nope. And in...

Zany. We probably all think of it as "comic, acting like a buffoon to entertain others." But did you know that it was actually originally a person (so a noun) in a comedy? Yep! A zany has been a comic performer since the 1580s. But you may be wondering where the word...

Doldrums. Interestingly, this is a plural word that has no singular...anymore. Once upon a time, there was indeed a singular version, and a doldrum was a "dull person." (Dol is a variation of dull.) Over time, however, that meaning disappeared, and was replaced...

This one comes to you courtesy of fellow author and friend Rhonda Ortiz, who happened to mention in an email that baguette is a relatively new word. I'd never stopped to ponder when the famous French loaf may have come to be--in my mind, as long as there's been Paris,...

The history of the word cardinal in English is rather interesting. It comes from the Latin cardinalis, meaning "chief, principal." But it first came over to English not as an adjective with that meaning, but as the noun--as in, the order in the Church. Since the 12th...

Did you know that the most-used definition of problematic--namely, "constituting or causing difficulty"--only dates from around the 1960s?? I didn't! But as it turns out, that use is directly taken from a word coined for use in sociology. So what, you may ask, did the...

Unlike mercurial of last week, martial is a word I use plenty--I imagine we all do. And I even knew where this one came from, LOL. Martial means "warlike; pertaining to war" and for good reason--it comes from the Roman god Mars, the god of war. What I didn't realize...

Ready for the next installment of our "adjectives from mythology" series? Today we're taking a look at a word I honestly don't use very often. In fact, if one of my kids were to ask, "What does mercurial mean?" I probably would have given them a look and said, "Why...

For the next couple weeks, I'm going to do a little mini-series on some adjectives we have that are based on the names of ancient mythological gods. As I was reading through a list of some of these, I found it so fascinating! So we'll start off with Zeus. Now, I know...

We probably all know that cornucopia literally means "horn of plenty," from the Latin.  And it's been a traditional symbol of Thanksgiving and a fruitful harvest since...well...forever. But do you know the actual history of it? I didn't! The story of the cornucopia...

A couple weeks ago as Halloween stuff was everywhere, my family was talking one night about the word monster and where it might have come from. We were musing that since it ends in -ster, and -ster usually indicates "someone who does a particular task" (like spinster...

I'm sure we've all noticed that history and story look mighty similar. Well, for good reason--they're both taken directly from the same French word, estoire or estorie,which came in turn from Latin and Greek. The literal meaning is "a chronicle of events," and has...

Did you know that greg is Latin for "flock or herd"? Yeah, neither did I. 😉 But that then makes sense when we look at some of the words that have greg as their root: Congregate - to come together as a groupSegregate - to separate from a group And then the one that...

A phrase from the archives today...Original post published 2/20/2017 Another special request today, though there isn't quite as much information on it as there was on last week's . . . The question was where the expression "the dickens" comes from. Well, the answer's...

When we think about  numbers, we don't often consider that once upon a time, they didn't go very high. But in fact, in ancient days, there weren't words for anything greater than "ten thousand." In the Ancient Greek and Roman eras, this was the largest number known,...

I recently saw a list of fun Colonial-era words that we should totally bring back into use.  One of them was savvy, which anyone who watched Pirates of the Caribbean can hear in Jack Sparrow's voice. Well, just for the record, Jack was totally using it appropriately....

A couple weeks ago, my husband said something about something costing "Ten Gs" and my mother-in-law said, "Where does that come from, anyway?" Cue the chime of "Word of the week!" from my kids, LOL. So obviously we knew that "G" was just short for grand. But why and...

(A revisit from 2012) Is summer hot dog season in your family? This year we've started grilling out on our campfire ring every Sunday with my mother-in-law, and hot dogs are pretty much always on the menu. But have you ever wondered where they got their name? Well, a...

I'm currently reading Siri Mitchell's State of Lies for my book club (SO GOOD!!!!), in which the heroine is a quantum physicist. (Which her 6-yr-old son calls a fizziest, which made me giggle.) I've been thoroughly enjoying all the science jokes on her T-shirts, and...