Posts in Origin of the word
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Origin of the word "Wristband"
A wristband today can be several things at once: the buttoned cuff of a shirt sleeve, a terry strip that soaks up sweat, a silicone loop used as a ticket, or the strap that holds a watch in place. All
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Origin of the word "Signaler"
A person, a device, a job In American English, a signaler is anyone or anything that sends a signal. The word can name a person waving flags on a hillside, a railway worker among levers and lamps, a s
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Origin of the word "Cloture"
Ending a debate by force of numbers In American political English, cloture is the procedure that stops debate in a legislature so a vote can take place. It is the usual name, especially in the United
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Origin of the word "Protoplasm"
Living jelly, then a looser label In present-day English, protoplasm is the living contents of a cell: a semi-fluid mix of water, proteins, salts, and other compounds. Older biological usage often fol
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Origin of the word "Yore"
Today yore survives almost only in two frames: of yore and days of yore. As a noun it names a time long past, the kind of past that feels older than living memory. Dictionaries mark it poetic or archa
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Origin of the word "Nahum"
A name that stayed a name In present-day English, Nahum is not a common noun. It does not name a tool, a feeling, or an action. It is a proper name with three tightly related uses: the seventh of the
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Origin of the word "Diffusion"
A word for spreading In current English, diffusion names a spreading that happens by contact, mixing, or gradual transmission rather than by a single push. Heat moves through a wall this way. A new to
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Origin of the word "Pusher"
Force first, then a seller A pusher, in the oldest and still living sense, is a person or a machine that applies force so that something else moves. The word covers a station worker packing passengers
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Origin of the word "Cobalt"
Cobalt in modern English is first a chemical element: a hard, magnetic, steel-grey metal, symbol Co, atomic number 27, found with nickel and copper ores and used in high-temperature alloys, rechargeab
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Origin of the word "Mulberry"
What the word names now Mulberry is the everyday English name for trees of the genus Morus and for the clustered fruit they bear. Ripe fruit is usually a deep purple-black, sometimes paler on the whit
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Origin of the word "Lorgnette"
A lorgnette is a pair of eyeglasses or opera glasses mounted on a handle. You raise it when you want a closer look and lower it when you are done. It is not worn like ordinary spectacles: nothing rest
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Origin of the word "Scurf"
A name for what the skin sheds Scurf is a short, unpretty English noun for the thin dry scales that lift off the epidermis. In ordinary speech it often means dandruff. The dictionaries keep a wider wo
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Origin of the word "Newmarket"
In a modern English dictionary, newmarket is rarely the Suffolk town on the map. It is a long close-fitting riding coat of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a domestic gambling game of the
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Origin of the word "Theophylline"
Theophylline is the English name of a bitter methylxanthine alkaloid, chemically 1,3-dimethylxanthine, that occurs in small amounts in tea leaves and, in traces, in coffee, cacao, yerba maté, guarana,
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Origin of the word "Canard"
English uses canard for a false story that is offered as news. The claim may be a rumor, a planted report, or a tired belief that survives after the evidence has gone. In political and historical writ
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