Words, words, words…

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Introduction

WORD:

[OE. word str. n. = OFris., OS. word, MDu. wort (Du. woord), OHG., MHG., G. wort>, ON. orth (Sw., Da. ord), Goth. waurd OTeut. *wurdom pre-Teut. *wrdho-; c.f. Lith. vardas name, Lett. wards word, forename, OPruss. wirds word, OIr. fordat "inquiunt".
Indo-Eur. werdh- is generally taken to be a deriv. of wer-, were-, which appears in Gr. wereo I shall say, wretor speaker, L. verbum word, Skr. vratam command, law, etc.]
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition

I began this web page a few years ago to note a few odd or amusing word derivations I had encountered in my trips through the dictionaries, and to put the matter kindly, the process has gotten somewhat out of hand.

In response to many complaints (well, two or three complaints) that I change this site too often and in random places, so it's difficult to find the new material spread through the old, I've begun to date my changes in the form [ddmmmyy] before the item. For instance, a search for "Mar07" should find all the changes to a section made in that month. To reduce clutter, only changes in the last year are shown. If you haven't read this page for a year or more, you need to start at the beginning anyway.

Here are some notes about a few stylistic quirks, as well as a couple of disclaimers:

Words standing for themselves, used in constructions like 'It is well-known that "algebra" is Arabic', are usually within quotation marks [inverted commas] as shown, unless the meaning is quite clear in context. (Without the quotation marks, the reader has no way of knowing if I meant the word or the subject was Arabic in origin.) Because of this, I follow the British custom of placing punctuation outside quotation marks unless the quoted material is itself a sentence.
A stand-alone letter or digraph referring to itself, used in constructions like "The sound of English /TH/ is rare among the world's languages," or "The British sometimes don't pronounce /R/," are marked as shown.
I don't use periods in initialisms such as USA, PhD, AM, PM, etc. A few are consistently shown in small capital letters, mainly ie for "Indo-European", oe for "Old English", ce and bce (see below), and oed for the Oxford English Dictionary.
The first time a word under discussion appears in a particular section, it is shown in bold sans-serif or bold italic, depending on whether it is English or foreign. All such emphasized words are in the index on the left.
This document is not constrained by political correctness. In the discussion of word meanings, I sometimes talk about words that are offensive to some people, whether obscenities (shit, fuck), blasphemies (God damn it, Jesus Christ!), or ethnic slurs (Nigger, Dago). My defense is that these are words just like any other, and that euphemisms like "excrement", "goldarn it", or "the N-word" would be ridiculous in context. If this concept is bothersome, you may wish to click here and get it over with.
I have tried hard to keep the document religiously neutral. English obviously has more words derived from the Judeo/Christian tradition than from, say, Islam or Buddhism, and such terms need explanations, but I hope the discussions of all such words are equally objective. Many authors who wish to avoid being "Christian-centric" use bce (Before Common Era) and ce (Common Era) instead of bc (Before Christ) and ad (Anno Domini, Year of the Lord) for dates, and I follow that usage here.
Last but not least, I am not a professional lexicographer or linguist, and this page isn't aimed at such. Many times I will say things like "clock is the same word as cloak". This is usually gross over-simplification — what I really mean is "clock and cloak are derivatives of the same ancestral word through different paths and/or languages." Sometimes the experts have competing theories on where a particular word originated, in which case I'll usually pick the one I like the best and ignore the other. In a few cases I'll claim a relationship that the best authorities insist is not there, usually because I think the ancient languages had a lot more puns than said authorities are willing to admit to.
Sometimes two versions of a word have drifted so far in form that the reader's eyebrow might be raised. A classic example is that to exact and to squat are almost identical. (The Latin basis of "exact" is ex-actus, driven out, while "squat" is from ex-co-actus, driven out together or compressed, by way of Old French esquatar, to crush. The oed has a quotation about squatting someone's brains out. I normally won't go into this amount of detail, so you'll just have to trust me.
Even though I try to be entertaining, I also have tried hard to avoid the "ben trovato" (well found) legends that crop up about words. (For example, posh is not an acronym for "Port Out, Starboard Home" describing comfortable ship accommodations to the Orient, fuck is not "for unlawful carnal knowledge", a tip is not "to insure promptness", shit is not "ship high in transit" from the guano trade, and the sirloin was not knighted by any king, however hungry.) [27Jan08] On the other hand, there are a few "too good to be true" derivations that really are correct — for examples see the discussions of spic, sneeze, Jehovah, twerp, bunk, and Naugahyde.
If by some chance you are a real expert who has wandered onto this site, please, please take a few minutes to let me know about the inevitable mistakes you encounter here. My email address is dierdorf@io.com.

If you got to this page directly from elsewhere on the web, you can backtrack to my home page if you wish.