the study of the origin of words and phrases.
Questions tagged [etymology]
18 questions
72
votes
3 answers
Is there a relationship between the words "night" and "eight"?
I have seen on Facebook, a post (in French) claiming that many words for the night are based on a n+respective number for the number 8. For example on this website,
Language Number 8 night
français huit nuit
anglais eight …
clem steredenn
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2 answers
Is "tag" named for "touch and go"?
A Facebook meme (with 146 thousand shares) asks:
How old were you when you learned that the game TAG stands for "Touch and Go"
I was today years old...
Is the etymology of the game tag an acronym of "touch and go"?
Oddthinking
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Was the name "Wendy" created for Peter Pan?
I ran across something odd today...
I have an iPhone app that lists facts, trivia, and other useless information (it's called Cool Facts, downloaded from iTunes). So far, nothing I've found on it has been terribly inaccurate. However, flipping…
Monkey Tuesday
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38
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1 answer
Did the computing term "bug" come from a moth stuck in a computer?
The story goes like this:
Back when computers still consisted of vacuum tubes, a system
went down one day and people started investigating the cause. They found that a moth
was stuck in the computer which fouled it up. When asked what was…
user6204
23
votes
4 answers
Does the word "butterfly" stem from an erroneous transcription of "flutterby"?
I've heard it said on multiple occasions that the word Butterfly was originally Flutterby, but that it was either misread or mispronounced and somehow ended up being recorded as Butterfly instead.
I did a quick google and found the following for the…
quant
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22
votes
1 answer
Was the oven mitt first developed by Earl Mitt?
Did "Earl Mitt" even exist at all? I first heard this story from an answer to this English Language and Usage Stack Exchange question about oven mitts/oven gloves.
Earlier today, the story was in Wikipedia, but it has since been removed; perhaps by…
paradisi
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Was the phrase "hello" popularized because of the name of Alexander Graham Bell's wife/girlfriend "Margaret Hello"?
This is a popular explanation of the etymology of the word hello, seen in many email forwards:
When you lift the phone, you say "Hello".
Do you know what is the real meaning of "Hello" It is the name of a
girl.
Yes .... and do you know who is…
Lincity
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18
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4 answers
Was the word 'racist' coined by Trotsky in 1927?
According to the image below, "racist is a made up word by Leon Trotsky in 1927."
I searched in the Online Etymology Dictionary and found that
racist (n.)
1932 [as a noun], 1938 as an adjective, from race (n.2); racism is first attested 1936 (from…
Elberich Schneider
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15
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4 answers
Is Nazi a diminutive of Ignatius?
The German Wikipedia page for Nazi claims that the word Nazi is a diminutive form of Ignatius (Ignatz). The cited source is etymonline.com:
The 24th edition of Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (2002) says the word Nazi was favored in…
user7920
14
votes
1 answer
Was "bug" used to refer to software bugs before being popularized by Grace Hopper?
A very famous photo is the following
which is the picture of a moth stuck to a piece of paper with the writing "First actual case of a bug being found".
We already know that bug was being used for glitch in engineering for a long time (Edison used…
Sklivvz
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11
votes
2 answers
Did "secular" mean "non-denominational"?
The Reverend Fred Nile MLC is leader of the Christian Democratic Party in Australia. In a letter to a major Australian newspaper on the subject of ethics classes as an alternative to Special Religious Instruction in Australia schools, he wrote of…
Oddthinking
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9
votes
1 answer
Is the use of X for unknown quantities taken from the Arabic word "shay"?
In this TED Talk, the speaker says that the use of X for unknown quantities was the result of Spanish people taking the Arabic word shay (meaning "thing"), which was used by Arabs to denote unknown quantities, and representing it by the Greek letter…
Daud
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8
votes
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Was the living room called the "death room" around World War I? If so, by whom?
On a Reddit post I recently stumbled across the surprising assertion that the living room was once called the death room, with the explanation being given variously that it's where you would mourn the dead, or it's where you would leave their bodies…
Muzer
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6
votes
3 answers
Did Marx use the word "capitalism"?
I'm finding contradictory accounts on this.
First, we need to differentiate between the words "capital", "capitalist", and "capitalism". According to "Civilization and Capitalism", by Fernand Braudel, the late Latin word Capitale in the sense of…
luchonacho
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Was the term "goosebumps" ever used to refer to venereal sores?
This Cracked.com article claims that "goosebumps" used to refer to venereal sores:
Well, it's thought that "Goosey" is referencing an old slang term
"goose" which was a nice but roundabout way of saying "voluptuous lady
of the night" which in…
March Ho
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