Title	Excerpt	Author	Date	Total Comments	Recent Comment
Games With Words: VerbCorner	A team of researchers at MIT has devised a series of games to crowdsource the meaning of verbs. They’re gathering data on how particular verbs are used (e.g., does to strike always denote physical contact). There are currently four different games available with more promised. Crowdsourcing the analysis of data…	Dave Wilton	05/22/13	0
Netflix Adultery	The phrase Netflix adultery popped out at me when I read this Maureen O’Connor column in New York magazine. Netflix adultery is when you secretly watch a show that you had promised to watch with your partner. A quick Googling shows that O’Connor didn’t coin the term, but it is…	Dave Wilton	05/21/13	0
DARE Funding	A month ago I reported on the unfortunate situation with funding for the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). The situation has improved significantly. A number of contributors have stepped up to the plate. An anonymous donor has contributed $100,000 and the American Dialect Society has pitched in $30,000. The…	Dave Wilton	05/09/13	0
Trademarking “Día De Los Muertos”	This is a bit off topic for wordorigins.org, but I’ve addressed intellectual property issues before, and while I mostly focus on copyright, distinguishing between copyright and trademark is an important thing to do—especially if you’re a reporter writing a story about it. Disney’s Pixar Studios has an upcoming film based…	Dave Wilton	05/08/13	0
A Surfeit of Canadian Slang	There is a particular genre of news article in which a columnist attempts to pack in as many slang words into the available space as possible. The news “value” of such an article is that it supposedly shows “how weird our language is” or “what the cool kids are saying.”…	Dave Wilton	05/05/13	0
Welcome to 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.…	Dave Wilton	05/01/13	0
Interactive Map of San Francisco Toponyms	Noah Veltman, a Knight-Mozilla News Fellow at the BBC, has created an interactive map that displays the origin of place names (mostly street names) in San Francisco. It’s well-designed and easy to use. I can’t vouch for the accuracy, which is notoriously difficult to achieve with toponymic etymologies, but if…	Dave Wilton	04/30/13	0
Review: How to Write an Essay in Five Easy Steps	How to Write an Essay in Five Easy Steps Scribendi (Karen Ashford), $2.99 (Kindle e-book) I’m always on the lookout for good sources of writing advice that I can pass on to my students. So when given the opportunity to review How to Write an Essay in Five Easy Steps…	Dave Wilton	04/18/13	0
DARE Needs Your Support	The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is the crown jewel of North American lexicography. It’s a six-volume dictionary of regionalisms gathered from across the United States. The sixth and final volume was published this year, but its work is not yet done. The dictionary’s staff is hard at work…	Dave Wilton	04/08/13	0
dismal	Originally a noun (and still a noun in some isolated uses), the adjective dismal comes into English, like many of our words, with the Normans, a compound formed from the Old French phrase dis mal, which in turn is from the Latin dies mali or “bad days.” The noun dismal,…	Dave Wilton	04/03/13	0
April fool	The practice of playing tricks on other people on the first of April arose in Europe and crossed the channel to Britain in the late seventeenth century. No one is certain why April first is associated with pranks, and there are numerous conjectures, but since none have any strong evidence…	Dave Wilton	03/31/13	0
up a creek, creek	See creek.	Dave Wilton	03/28/13	0
creek, up a creek	I had no idea that British usage of creek was different from the use of the word in the rest of the English-speaking world until I was translating an Old Norse work (appropriately enough regarding the discovery and exploration of Vinland) and found that my Old Norse dictionary, produced in…	Dave Wilton	03/28/13	0
acre	Acre, the unit of land measurement, comes down to us from the Old English æcer. The word is common throughout the Germanic languages, and has cognates in other Indo-European languages too, like the Latin ager and the Greek ἀγρός “field,” and the Sanskrit ajra “plain, open country.” The modern spelling…	Dave Wilton	03/24/13	0
holt	Holt, a word for a wooded area, a copse, goes back to Old English. It’s root is common Germanic, with cognates found in Old Norse, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German, etc. The word is found in line 2598 of Beowulf to describe how the hero’s men abandon him…	Dave Wilton	03/24/13	0
Book of Kells Now Online	Trinity College Dublin has now placed the Book of Kells online. Happy St. Patrick’s Day! [Discuss this post]	Dave Wilton	03/17/13	0
Digital Dictionaries	The Chronicle of Higher Education has a detailed article on how the transition to digital and online formats are changing dictionaries. Digital dictionaries are more convenient, provide feedback to lexicographers on what words are being searched, and have the tools to track social trends in vocabulary use. [Discuss this post]	Dave Wilton	03/15/13	0
Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles Online	The first edition, from 1967, of The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles is now available online. A second edition is in preparation with publication targeted for 2015. So now you can look up toque (1888, or 1882 for the spelling tuque) and Chesterfield (1903). Making this resource freely available…	Dave Wilton	03/12/13	0
Time Wasters	John McIntyre, copy editor for the Baltimore Sun, enumerates the various zombie rules that some people still cling to. There are no surprises on the list, but it’s nice to see them all listed all together. If he missed any, I can’t think of what they might be. I’m pleased…	Dave Wilton	03/08/13	0
The Problem With Peevery	Kory Stamper of the Harmless Drudgery blog points out the problems with correcting the grammar of others.	Dave Wilton	03/02/13	0
NBC Pronunciation Guide	Ben Trawick-Smith of the Dialect Blog has found a copy of The NBC Handbook of Pronunciation from over fifty years ago. It’s an interesting nugget. I didn’t know that American broadcasters had such guides, but I shouldn’t be surprised.	Dave Wilton	02/28/13	0
heaven	Heaven is a word that dates back to the Old English heofon. Its earliest sense is that of the sky, the firmament in which the stars are placed. From Beowulf, line 1571: swa of hefene hadre scineð rodores candel(as from heaven, the candle of the sky clearly shines) The plural…	Dave Wilton	02/22/13	0
Why Eminem is one of the most impressive lyricists ever	The title of this YouTube video is rather hyperbolic, but it makes a pretty persuasive case and gives a succinct lesson in how rhyme works in poetry along the way. (Tip o’ the hat to Elisa Tersigni)	Dave Wilton	02/19/13	0
Re-examining Orwell	Ed Smith over at the New Statesman has a rather good criticism of Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell’s essay is often trotted out as justification for grammatical prescriptivism, probably because of the six simple rules for good writing that Orwell promulgates. It is only second to…	Dave Wilton	02/19/13	0
Grammar of Newspaper Headlines	Newspaper headlines are a dialect of English in their own right. They don’t operate under the same grammatical and stylistic rules that normal prose does. In a brief post on the Lingua Franca blog, Allan Metcalf outlines the basic rules that govern headline writing. I’ve never seen these rules codified…	Dave Wilton	02/18/13	0
Beowulf MS Now Online	The British Library has put the Beowulf manuscript on line. Beowulf starts on folio 132r. The library’s announcement is here. The manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, contains two separate codices that have been bound together. The first, the Southwick Codex, occupies the first ninety-three folios. The Beowulf manuscript,…	Dave Wilton	02/11/13	0
full monty	This British phrase, meaning the whole thing, dates to at least 1979, and it’s of unknown origin. No one knows what or who monty refers to. The earliest known use of the phrase is in the 30 August 1979 issue of The Stage and Television Today in which one of…	Dave Wilton	02/10/13	0
J. K. Chambers on The Great Vowel Shift	University of Toronto linguistics professor J. K. “Jack” Chambers was on CBC radio Sunday talking about the Great Vowel Shift. It’s one of the better explanations of the topic in under ten minutes that I’ve heard. And radio is a much better medium to explain sound changes than anything in…	Dave Wilton	02/04/13	0
Twenty Words We (Probably) Don’t Owe to William Shakespeare	A 31 January posting on the Mental Floss website has been making the rounds of Facebook and other social media sites. The post, by Roma Panganiban, lists twenty words that Shakespeare allegedly coined. The post is unadulterated bardolatry. Yes, Shakespeare was the greatest English playwright and a pretty darn good…	Dave Wilton	02/02/13	0
Video: History of the Possessive	This is a fun video, and at first blush seems pretty accurate. ObQuibble: I question the use of the year 450 as the benchmark for Old English. That’s about the time the first Anglo-Saxons were landing in England. Most of our evidence for the language comes from several centuries later.…	Dave Wilton	01/27/13	0
Close, But No Cigar	The phrase close, but no cigar is traditionally uttered when someone falls just short of achieving a goal. The phrase comes to us from the early twentieth-century practice of giving out cigars as prizes for winning games of chance or skill at carnivals, fairs, and other attractions. As I am…	Dave Wilton	01/21/13	0
The Violence Must End	4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence	Dave Wilton	01/07/13	0
Books Read, 2012	Like last year, I’m publishing a list of the books I’ve read over the previous year. There are about as many titles as last year, but the total word count is lower given that many of them are poems. But then, many are also in Old English, so reading is…	Dave Wilton	01/01/13	0
spitting image	Spitting image or spit and image (sometimes reanalyzed as splitting image) stems from the metaphor of spitting out an exact likeness of oneself. The metaphor appears as early as 1602 when Nicholas Breton writes in his book Wonders Worth Hearing, “twoo girles, [...] the one as like an Owle, the…	Dave Wilton	12/29/12	0
whole nine yards, the	Few phrases have as many tales attached to their origin as does the phrase, the whole nine yards, which has spawned a raft of popular etymologies, all of them wrong. The origin of the phrase has long been a mystery, but recently researchers Bonnie Taylor-Blake and Fred Shapiro have uncovered…	Dave Wilton	12/28/12	9	04/13/08
Hyphens: A Rant (So To Speak)	Although Jen Doll calls her piece a “rant,” it really isn’t one. It’s rare that a mass-market publication like The Atlantic prints a thoughtful article that effectively deals with the niceties and subtleties of punctuation, but this one on the hyphen is just that. Judging from my students’ essays, the…	Dave Wilton	12/05/12	0
Lincoln’s Language	Ben Zimmer has a nice piece in today’s Boston Globe on how writer Tony Kushner came up with the authentic language used in Spielberg’s Lincoln. [Discuss this post.]	Dave Wilton	12/02/12	0
OED Editing Drama	There’s nothing like the excitement generated by a good story about dictionary editing gone wild. The Guardian ran this piece on Monday about the OED “covertly” deleting words because they came from sources outside England. The only problem is, that it doesn’t seem to be true. Yes, the dictionary deleted…	Dave Wilton	11/28/12	0
AP on Homophobia	The Associated Press Stylebook, which is something of the standard setter among American journalists, has come out discouraging the use of the word homophobia (and Islamophobia as well): phobia An irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness. Examples: acrophobia, a fear of heights, and claustrophobia, a fear of…	Dave Wilton	11/28/12	0
Best Word Ever	Diphthong. At least according to Ted McCragg and his blog Questionable Skills. McCragg conducted an unscientific competition between words organized into brackets like the NCAA basketball championship. The others in the final four were gherkin, kerfuffle, and hornswoggle. You can read more about the competition in The Atlantic. [All this…	Dave Wilton	11/26/12	0
Up Goer Five	xkcd has done it again. This time it’s a drawing of “the only flying space car that’s taken anyone to another world (explained using only the ten hundred words people use the most often).” A vocabulary of only a thousand words is limiting, but you can get points across. I’m…	Dave Wilton	11/12/12	0
Book Review: Punctuation..?	Punctuation..? by User Design (Thomas Bohm) is a short handbook on how to use the most common punctuation marks, plus some of the not-so-common ones. Illustrated with simple, yet intriguing line drawings, the book covers British stylistic practice, not North American, and is aimed at the novice writer who is…	Dave Wilton	11/07/12	0
The Need for Cursive Writing?	This article is a few months old, but I just saw it, and it got my hackles up. I’m not sure what’s scarier, that this is even a debate or the level of argument that is being put forth by these educators.	Dave Wilton	11/04/12	0
Odd Toppled Trees	While here in Toronto the advent of Hurricane Sandy isn’t the cause of evacuations and frenzied preparations that it is for my relatives and friends back on the Jersey Shore, but that doesn’t mean we won’t feel its effects. But one sentence from the Canadian Weather Office’s warning for the…	Dave Wilton	10/29/12	0
Did Chaucer Coin “Twitter”?	Um, no. Or at least, probably not. But that’s what The Atlantic Wire claimed yesterday in another conflating of coinage with earliest recorded usage. The Atlantic’s blog post was inspired by this tweet from the editors of the OED which says “Chaucer provides our earliest ex. of twitter, verb.” In…	Dave Wilton	10/26/12	0
Sex-Neutral Terms	This post on the Economist’s “Johnson” blog on language addresses sex-neutral terms and how they’ve been patchily applied in English. While the general thrust of the article is correct, the application of sex-neutral terms, like most things having to do with language, is inconsistent, at points the article starts to…	Dave Wilton	10/17/12	0
Words and Politics (and Bold as Brass)	In this political season it may be worthwhile to take a moment to ponder the relationship between words and political reality, and which one really influences the other. Do words shape political reality? Or does reality change the meaning of our words? Mark Forsyth takes a good look at this…	Dave Wilton	10/08/12	0
Video: Naco, Pocho	A neat video (12 minutes) on two Mexican slang terms naco, “common, tacky person,” and pocho “Mexican-American.” Both are derogatory, but have been reclaimed and are used as a proud self-identification for some. For me, the best part of the video are the last few minutes where the interviews touch…	Dave Wilton	10/06/12	0
Contest: Devise a Silly “Grammar” Rule	Allan Metcalf over at the Lingua Franca blog is sponsoring a contest to solicit new bogus grammar/usage rules. The example that Metcalf gives is to use “centered on” as opposed to “centered around.” The rule you propose must be new. It can’t be in any standard usage manual. But it…	Dave Wilton	10/04/12	0
OED Appeals	The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary are calling upon the public to help them find antedatings and early uses of a number of terms. Those terms, and the dates the OED currently has citations for in its files, are: Bellini (1965) FAQ (1989) disco (1964) cootie (1967) (in the…	Dave Wilton	10/04/12	0