Linguistics

Warranty/Guarantee, Warden/Guardian, reWard/reGuardHave you ever wondered why English has some very similar pairs of words, but with one having a ‘gu’ where the other has a ‘w’? The origin of this phenomenon turns out to be quite interesting, and requires understand a little bit of the history of the French language, and its influence on […]

When several words in the same language share an origin, they are called “doublets”.Because English has words from so many different Indo-European sources, it is full of examples like these.

The English words “wheel” and “cycle” are related, as is the word “chakra” (a centre of spiritual energy within the body, in Hinduism). When two words have a shared etymology within a language, we call them “doublets”. Another surprising doublet of these is “Ku Klux Klan”. The “Ku Klux” bit comes from the Greek “Kuklos”. […]

There are several pairs of doublets (related words) in English where one is from Norman and has a ‘c’, and the the other is from Old French and has a ‘ch’.‘car’ vs ‘chariot’ is a example, and they have the bonus of also being related to “horse”.Others include ‘castle’ vs ‘chateau’, ‘cattle’ vs ‘chattel’, ‘canal’ […]

The idea of the 7 day week was introduced to Germanic peoples by the Romans, and so Germanic speakers mostly just replaced the Latin names of these days with Germanic gods or words that seemed like the best translations of the Roman words. The 7 names the Romans gave to their weekdays coincided with the […]

The etymologies of the English names of the planets and dwarf planets of our solar system All the planet names come from Greek and Roman gods, except Earth. The dwarf planet names are also from gods, but from much more varied languages: in the 21st century it has become increasingly common for astronomers name solar […]

Grime, Christ, and ghee share the same Indo-European root! The word “grimace” is also cognate, coming from French “grimace”, from Frankish *grima (mask), from the Proto-Germanic *grīmô. Greek Khristos is a calque of the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ‎ (māšīaḥ), also meaning “anointed”. Māšīaḥ was also borrowed into Greek and Latin, eventually reaching English as the word “messiah”. […]

Yet another surprising etymology graphic:“Cow” and “beef” are related words.After the Norman invasion of England in 1066, the country came under the rule of a Norman French speaking nobility.This lead to a situation where the live animals were handled by Middle English speakers, while the cooked animal was eaten by theirNormal French speaking lords.The result: […]