Detail of Bayeux Tapestry: Norman cavalry attacking an English fort. Image by Myrabella, 2013, licensed under Creative Commons.

Welcome to Wordorigins.org

January 6, 2023

From Barflies to Bitcoin: How Words Map Our Modern Era examines each year of the twentieth century, plus the opening decades of the twenty-first, for the new words that make their appearance during them

We have a Substack! And we’re on Mastodon and Post too.

I’ve started a Substack for Wordorigins.org, and I’m abandoning the Patreon feed. If you want to keep up the latest updates to the site, you can start a free or a paid subscription.

You can also follow the site on Mastodon.

And on Post.

And we’re still on Twitter, at least until it implodes either through engineering failure or toxic overload.

Latest posts:

Coming soon:

bigwig
trivia / trivial
americium
at first blush
tongue in cheek
antimony
hijack / skyjack
Burma / Myanmar
argon
die
ale / beer
arsenic

Wordorigins.org focuses on word and phrase origins and the history of the English language, but from time to time expands into discussions about language in general. The site primarily deals with English and those languages that have influenced the development of the English language.*

There are three main areas of the site:

the Big List that details the origin and history of specific words and phrases
the Harmless Drudge blog where I discuss concepts about language in general
and the Discussion Forums, where you can contribute.

This site takes a different approach than dictionaries and many other historical linguistics sites do. Instead of simply supplying the etymological roots of words and providing a few short examples of how they have been used over the centuries, when I provide examples of how words and phrases have been used, I extract much longer passages, sometimes several paragraphs, of surrounding text to provide a fuller context of how and where the word or phrase appears. I have found that the brief clippings given in dictionaries, while perfectly adequate to illustrate the use of the term, often elide fascinating and important insights into our past and how our present came to be.

Language is the creation of us all. You might say that language is the original crowd-sourced tool. As such, it is a reflection of who we are and where we come from. Embedded in the English language is a history of great works of literature—both canonical and from less-often-read writers—and ennobling acts and concepts. But also embedded in it is a history of racism, enslavement, colonialism, and sexism. What we see in that reflection isn’t always pretty, but the language that we speak, whether for good or for ill, is central to our identities. It shows the best and the worst in us, who we truly are.

I hope you enjoy the site, which has been going since 1997. And feel free to let me know what you like and dislike about it, to correct any errors you find, and to engage in the discussion more broadly. You can do this via email dave@wordorigins.org or via the discussion forums.

—Dave Wilton

*It’s not that other languages aren’t important or interesting; it’s just that I’m a native speaker of English and trained in medieval English language and literature and don’t have the competence to address other languages in detail. Plus, tackling the history of any one language is a big enough job in and of itself.

Subscribe Via Substack

November 20, 2022

I'm adjusting how I handle Wordorigins.org's social media. I'm no longer going to be using Patreon, and instead I've started a Substack.

Substack more neatly fits what I'm doing and allows me to keep the information on the site free for everyone while simultaneously allowing dedicated community members to contribute financially as they are able. If you're not familiar with it, Substack is a combination blog and email list. New posts are emailed out to all subscribers and then archived on the Substack site.

The Substack site is wordorigins.substack.com. There’s not much there now, as of 20 November 2022, but it will rapidly fill with content over the next few months.

Subscriptions are free, but I encourage those who want to help keep the lights on here at the site to opt for a paid subscription at $5/month or $50/year. Paid subscribers will be able to comment on posts on Substack. Any financial assistance is greatly appreciated.

For those who don’t wish to subscribe, have no fears. I still intend to make all the content here at Wordorigins.org free. All material published on Substack will eventually find its way onto the main Wordorigins.org site. And the existing discussion forum will continue as before. So, if you don’t want to subscribe, you’ll still have access to all the content, just a bit later than subscribers.

Reusing and Sharing Wordorigins.org material

December 29, 2020

The text portions of Wordorigins.org can be licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

You are free to share, copy, and redistribute the textual material on this website in any medium or format and to adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material under the following terms:

Attribution—You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests Wordorigins.org or David Wilton endorses you or your use.
Non-Commercial—You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
ShareAlike—If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
No Additional Restrictions—You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Images on this site are not subject to this license. In most cases, they have been created by others and are either in the public domain, used under a Creative Commons license of their own, or under fair use. Check the credit for each image to see how that particular image may or may not be shared or reused.

New & Improved Wordorigins.org

May 8, 2020

8 May 2020

It looks different, but the changes are not simply cosmetic. I’ve made some significant changes “under the hood.” All the old content is still here, and the substantive changes are mainly in the discussion forums.

It’s now easier to join and post to the discussion forums. There’s a new Captcha system that will, hopefully, weed out the bots that attempt to spam the site. Additionally, I also must approve each new user’s first post.

While I’ve done the best I can at troubleshooting problems in advance, let me know if something doesn’t work or you encounter broken links.

I’m also engaged in updating and revising the older Big List entries, so you should start to see a steady stream of new and revised posts for various words and phrases. As part of this revision, I’m including much lengthier quotations, and not just the short snippets that you find in most dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary. Since this site is online, I have the luxury of not being constrained by the space limitations that ordinary dictionaries have. Also, I now have access, through Princeton University Library,* to a huge range of databases and materials that were previously unavailable to me. So, I can provide expanded versions of the quotations found in other dictionaries. My thinking here is that not only will the longer quotations provide a clearer understanding of exactly how a word or phrase was used, but the longer quotations place the terms in historical and cultural context, and are often just plain fun to read.

* = I mean no disrespect the other university libraries where I have worked—they have been excellent—but Princeton is simply awash with cash, and they use it to purchase access to an ungodly amount of material.