Word of the Week

Swear is one of those words that comes to us alllll the way from Old English. In its original (and still a surviving) meaning, it's simply "to take an oath." You may wonder, then, why it's sometimes associated with "use bad language"? I know I have! That meaning is...

When you look up mission in the dictionary, there are a LOT of definitions listed. A task a group is charged with. A calling or vocation. A group of people organized to carry out a certain task. A ministry. Then, in entry 5, you get the obsolete one: "the act of...

I've shared the etymology of holiday before, back in 2011, but I figured ten years is enough time that I can revisit. 😉 I always find this one kind of funny...at least when people object to people saying "Happy Holidays!" instead of "Merry Christmas." My opinion has...

Decadent. I don't know about you, but when I hear that word, I think of ooey-gooey chocolate ... maybe caramel ... something rich and satisfying and the highest heights of delightful. Turns out, I'm a victim of a 1970s-and-onward advertising hijack of the word....

Last week I took a look at the etymology of the word author (which you'd have thought I'd looked up long ago, right??), and I mentioned its interesting connection to the word authority...which is, of course, what we're looking at today! To be honest, I assumed that...

I can't believe I've never looked this one up before, but...clearly I hadn't, LOL. Because I was completely surprised to learn that author did not originally mean "writer." Did you know that?? Author has been in use in English since the mid-1300s, taken from the Latin...

Anyone else like to watch Forged in Fire? If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a competition show where smiths are forging knives. So fascinating! Watching that show has taught me that one of the most important things for steel is that it's well tempered....

We recently celebrated my daughter's 16th birthday, and one of her requests was to get her ears pierced. I got mine done when I was five, but I actually stopped wearing earrings after high school and just never picked the habit back up...so I thought, "Oh, I'll go...

This one comes a special request from a regular reader (Hi, Bev!), who was wondering about the phrase "doggie bag." It's pretty straightforward, really, but interesting nonetheless! The phrase is first recorded in the 1960s, for a take-home container of leftovers from...

Did you know that galaxy is from the Greek word for milk? I didn't! Given that our galaxy is the Milky Way though, I wasn't terribly surprised. The original Greek phrase was in fact galaxias kyklos, meaning "milky circle." The term made its way into Latin, and from...

I daresay we all know what I mean when I say the word Utopia, right. It's a perfect society. We all know it's pretty much mythical, much like the one Socrates outlines in "The Republic." And we probably also know the word was coined by Thomas Moore when he wrote a...

Today's Word of the Week actually came in as a special request...and I admit it's a word I've always just shrugged off too. What, exactly, do people mean when they toss around postmodern or postmodernism in their conversations? Turns out, the word can mean different...

My mom sent me this one, so of course I had to look into it! I found the explanation pretty quick, but nevertheless enlightening, so let's take a look! Smithereens dates from 1810 and has always meant "small fragments." No surprise there. But where does it come from?...

I looked up the word dunce during my marathon writing session for the final book in the Secrets of the Isles trilogy, just to make sure I hadn't been using it for years when I shouldn't have been (because those sneak in!), and I was fascinated at what I learned! It...

The other week at one of our tea parties, a guest asked me how my writing was going, and I said, “Oh, you know. Plugging away at it.” My daughter, who always joins us for these parties, looked over at me like I was crazy and said, “Plugging? Seriously? That’s a...

Did you know that algebra and algorithm are not only related, but both derived from a (mangled) translation of a mathematician? Yep! In the 9th century, a Baghdad scholar named Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi wrote a famous treatise on mathematics that...

My daughter asked me a few weeks ago why a last name is called a surname. I had no idea...but of course declared, "Word of the week!" and promptly looked it up. 😉 And it's both straightforward and not. Sur is Latin for "above," so the original meaning of surname was...

It's summertime in the northern hemisphere, our kids are out of school, so many of us are thinking about one of our favorite things...VACATION! But have you stopped to wonder about the history of the word? I actually first took a look at it back in 2012, but it was...

I actually first looked at the etymology of motivation back in 2012, but...that's been a long time ago, LOL. And since summers can be a weird time of either little motivation or super-charged motivation, I figured it was a great time to revisit. Did you know that...

We all know what an infant is--a newborn baby. Pretty simple. What I didn't realize was that it actually comes from the Latin in meaning "not" and fari meaning "to speak." So it literally means "unable to speak." Who knew? Historically, infant in Latin meant a babe in...

You know how I often begin these posts by telling you about how my family was talking about this or that word, and I guess as to how it evolved, and I was right? Yeah...not the case this time at all. 😉 As it turns out, delight has nothing to do with light, as I was...

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...