Wordorigins.org

Wordorigins.org is devoted to the origins of words and phrases, or as a linguist would put it, to etymology. Etymology is the study of word origins. (It is not the study of insects; that is entomology.) Where words come from is a fascinating subject, full of folklore and historical lessons. Often, popular tales of a word’s origin arise. Sometimes these are true; more often they are not. While it can be disappointing when a neat little tale turns out to be untrue, almost invariably the true origin is just as interesting.

Wilton, D. (2004). Word myths: debunking linguistic urban legends. New York, Oxford University Press.

Did you ever think that Ring Around The Rosie makes reference to the Black Death of the Middle Ages? Or that the whole nine yards refers to the length of a machinegun ammo belt? Or perhaps that Eskimos have 500 words for snow? If so, then you have been taken in by a linguistic urban legend. Like classic urban legends, these linguistic legends are popular and pervasive. Instead of propagating cautionary tales about the dangers of modern life, linguistic urban folklore propagates stories and “facts” about language.

I’ve made some improvements to the navigation within the site. I’ve added alphabetical navigation to the Big List, so it should be easier to surf and find the terms you want. I also changed the format for how the archives of old articles are displayed on the pages; instead of a long list of links that necessitates a lot of vertical scrolling, it’s now a drop-down menu.

Enjoy.

One of the features that is changing with the new site is our weekly mailing list. We’re using a new back-end system to generate and send out the emails. Those of you that were subscribed to the email list on the old site have already been added and you should have already received your first email from the new system.

The mailing list is weekly, a digest of all that has been added to the site (other than the discussion forums) in the last week. If you subscribe to the RSS feed for the site, the email list will be duplicative.

For those that would like to subscribe, just enter your email address in the “Join our Mailing List” section of the right-hand column on any page and click the submit button. You will be sent a confirmation email with a web link to verify that you really want to subscribe. As before, the mail list is completely private. We do not sell or give out our list to anyone.

Note that the email list is separate from site “membership.” As not all members want the email, you must sign up for this separately.

And management of your email preferences is easier under the new system—there are none. To unsubscribe, simply click on the link at the bottom of any of the weekly messages.

Along with the new look, we’ve added some new features here at Wordorigins.org. One of the new features are RSS feeds.

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a way to receive notification of updates to websites, blogs, discussion forums, and the like. Wordorigins.org has two different RSS feeds, one for the main site and one for the discussion forums. So you have the choice of seeing updates for the main Wordorigins.org site, for the forums, or for both.