2025: My Year in Astrophotography

16 December 2025

My portable astrophotography rig: a Redcat 51 telescope and ZWO ASI2600MCDuo camera on a ZWO AM3 mount

My portable astrophotography rig: a Redcat 51 telescope and ZWO ASI2600MCDuo camera on a ZWO AM3 mount

In case you didn’t know, I not only do word origins and historical linguistics, I’m also an amateur astrophotographer; that is, I take pictures of the night sky. I’ve been doing it, off and on, since 2008. This is a compilation of the images I’ve taken during the past year. All but one of this year’s images were taken from my driveway in Princeton, New Jersey, under Bortle 6 (bright suburban) skies.

I post my images to the Astrophotography section of the Wordorigins website and to Astrobin.com. If you want all the technical details (equipment used, camera settings, etc.), Astrobin is the place to find them, along with images taken by other astrophotographers from around the world.

Astrophotography is more complicated than simply pointing a camera toward the sky. Deep-sky objects are very faint, usually invisible to the unaided eye in light-polluted skies. To get good images, one must have a mount that counteracts the rotation of the earth, allowing you to keep the target still in the frame over long periods. The final images are the result of stacking many exposures of several minutes each, sometimes taken over multiple nights. Above is a photo of one configuration I use. It’s a 127mm (5-inch) reflector telescope on an equatorial mount with a cooled, monochrome, astrophotography camera and filter wheel.

Although some of my images this year were taken with a “smart telescope” (technically dubbed electronically assisted astrophotography or EAA). A smart telescope is very much like simply putting the device on a tripod and telling the computer what to point at and take pictures of. The quality isn’t as good, but it’s still remarkably good for the price and level of difficulty.

Discuss this post

Flame & Horsehead Nebulae in Orion, 21 February

This is a 9 ½ minute exposure with my Dwarf II smart telescope. The bright star is the left-most star in Orion’s belt. Not a great picture, but decent considering the device and the fact that it is less than ten minutes of exposure time.

Pleiades (M45), 21 February

Another photo taken with my Dwarf II, this one with almost 27 minutes of exposure time. Compare it to this one I took in 2023 with my regular rig and 4 hours, 48 minutes of exposure.

Andromeda Galaxy (M31), 21 February

And yet another taken with the Dwarf II on the same night. This one has some 36 minutes of exposure time. Compare it to the next image, which I took with my portable rig later in the year.

Andromeda Galaxy (M31), 21–23 August

I’m showing this one out of order to highlight the quality difference between a smart and a regular telescope. This one was taken over three nights, for a total of over 13 ½ hours with my portable rig (the small but high-quality telescope and camera shown above). The comparison is unfair because of the big difference in exposure time. Had I taken 13 hours of photos with the smart telescope, that image would be much better. Still, the quality would not have been the same. But keep in mind the smart telescope is much less expensive and a lot easier to use. For what it is, it does a rather good job, but for the best images, there is no substitute (and least not yet; give it a few years and I’ll bet the smart telescopes will be doing a comparably good job).

North America (NGC 7000) and Pelican (IC 5070) Nebulae in Cygnus, 23 June

This was my “first light” with my portable rig, which I assembled this year. I’ve had the telescope and camera for a while, but the mount is new. This is only half an hour of exposure. All the rest of the photos for this year were taken with this rig.

Eagle Nebula (M16) in Serpens, 23 June

Another shot taken the same night. At the center of the Eagle Nebula are the “pillars of creation,” made famous by the iconic Hubble Telescope image.

Omega (M17) and Eagle (M16) Nebulae in Serpens, 24 June

Here is a wider field shot taken the next night.

Elephant’s Trunk Nebula (IC 1396) in Cepheus, 17–22 July

This one was taken over five nights, totaling 14 ½ hours of exposure time. The “elephant’s trunk” is the pillar of gas that is hanging down above the central star.

Bubble (NGC 7635) & Lobster Claw (SH2-157) Nebulae in Cassiopeia, 27–29 July

I overdid the color saturation on this one in order to bring out the oxygen (blue).

Lion Nebula (SH2-132) in Cepheus, 2–4 August

Gamma Cygni (Sadr) region & Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888) in Cygnus, 7–9 August & 10–12 August

These two images are both of the nebulosity surrounding the star Sadr in Cygnus. The difference in color is from the choices I made in post-processing. All the nebula photos are false-color images. To capture the faint nebulae in light-polluted skies, I use filters that capture narrow bandwidths of light corresponding to that emitted by hydrogen-alpha and oxygen-III ions. The hydrogen shows up as red or brown, the oxygen as blue or white. This would probably have been better as a mosaic—stitching multiple, overlapping photos together—but I was still learning new software to control the scope and hadn’t progressed to that yet (see the last photo in this set).

Triangulum Galaxy (M33), 25 August–1 September

This is the other spiral galaxy in our local group, besides our own Milky Way and Andromeda.

Heart (SH2-190) & Soul (SH2-199) Nebulae in Cassiopeia, 2–8 September

This is a mosaic of two images stitched together.

That’s it for my images of 2025. Hoping for clear skies in 2026.

English Translations of the Bible

Medieval illumination of a robed & seated man, holding a book and writing on parchment; above a winged lion blows a trumpet

Lindisfarne Gospels, frontispiece to the gospel of Mark, c. 715 CE

23 November 2025

There is perhaps no book as influential in the development of the English language as the Christian Bible. But to understand how the Bible influenced our language (and our history) we need to understand what the “Bible” is and how the translations we read today came into existence.

The Bible is not a single, cohesive book but rather a number of different collections of texts, and different faith traditions have different versions of the canon of texts included within it. The canon of the Roman Catholic Bible, for instance, was first formulated at the Council of Rome in 382 CE, containing 46 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New. (Claims that the canon was formulated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE are incorrect.) In contrast, Protestant Bibles typically contain only 39 books in its Old Testament, with 14 noncanonical books, the Apocrypha, often inserted between the Old and New Testaments. The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, consists of 24 books; many of the individual books in the Christian Old Testament are combined into single books in the Tanakh.

The individual texts that make up the canon of scripture were composed at different times over a period of some 1,600 years. And portions of individual books were often composed at different times and later combined into the books we have today. The oldest portion may be the “Song of Sea,” a poem that appears as Exodus 15:1–18, which was probably written in the late thirteenth century BCE. The newest book of the New Testament is probably Second Peter, written c. 120–150 CE. Furthermore, the dates of composition are quite different from the earliest extant copies. For instance, the composition of Leviticus may date to the sixth century BCE., while the oldest extant copy of portions of book is from the third century BCE. Many of oldest copies of the books of the Christian New Testament date to the second century CE.

Nor were the books of the Bible necessarily composed by the people to whom they are traditionally attributed. Moses, who is a literary creation and not a historical figure, did not write the Pentateuch. The canonical gospels were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And some of the letters commonly attributed to Paul were written by others.

And, of course, the English (and other) translations that we read today are interpretations of the original texts—all translation necessarily involves a degree of interpretation and editing of the text’s meaning. The Hebrew Bible was, of course, originally written in Hebrew, but over a period of a thousand years in which that language changed significantly. The Christian New Testament was primarily written in Koine (i.e. Hellenistic) Greek, although some of the books, particularly the Gospel of Matthew and the opening of the Gospel of John, may have been originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic.

Overlaid on top of this mélange of books from different periods, texts, and languages is a complex history of translation into English. It’s important to keep this in mind when one refers to the “Bible.” Even this essay is a high-level overview; the details are more complex than I outline here. And there are many, many more English translations than I list here. I only include the most significant in terms of how they influenced the development of the English language. For an excellent discussion of details and examples of specific challenges in biblical translation, see N. T. Wright’s 2011 The Monarchs and the Message: Reflections on Bible Translation from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century.

Source Material

These are the primary original-language texts and non-English translations of those original texts from which English translations of the Bible are drawn.

Septuagint

The Septuagint is a collection of second- and third-century BCE, Hellenistic (Koine) Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible. It is called the Septuagint (literally seventy) because tradition holds that its translation of the Pentateuch was produced by seventy translators. Technically, the title Septuagint refers only to the translation of the Pentateuch, but the word is commonly used to refer to this translation of the entire Hebrew Bible. The Septuagint provided the source texts for the Christian Old Testament in most early translations into English.

Vetus Latina

The Vetus Latina (literally Old Latin) is not a single Bible, but rather a collection of Latin translations of various Septuagint books and New Testament texts that preceded Jerome's late fourth-century Vulgate translation. There are some eighty surviving manuscripts containing these translations, some existing only as fragments. The surviving manuscripts date from c. 350–1300 CE, but the Latin translations of the texts they contain are older.

Vulgate

The Vulgate is Jerome’s late fourth-century translation of the Bible, a revision of the Vetus Latina. It is so called because Jerome used the vernacular Latin of the fourth century rather than the classical Latin of Cicero and Virgil. During the medieval period this was the translation most often used by the Roman Catholic Church, and it became the official Bible of the Church in the sixteenth century. This is the source text I most often cite on Wordorigins.org, rather than citing the Greek or Hebrew originals, as it was the version of the Bible that most writers in English would have relied upon during the medieval period. A revision known as the Nova Vulgata (New Vulgate) was published in 1979.

Masoretic Text

The Masoretic Text is the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) used by Rabbinic Judaism. It is so called because the texts were produced based on Hebrew and Aramaic texts by a group of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes working in what is now the Middle East between the seventh and tenth centuries CE. The oldest surviving complete version of the Masoretic Text is the Leningrad Codex, which dates to 1009 CE. The Masoretic Text is the source text for most Protestant translations of the Christian Old Testament.

Textus Receptus

The Textus Receptus (Received Text) is a collection of early printed Greek New Testament texts. The original edition was published by Erasmus in 1516 and was revised by later scholars. Early Modern translations of the New Testament into English relied heavily on the Textus Receptus as their source. More recent translations into English rely upon it less, as the number of Greek manuscripts available today is far greater than those available to Erasmus, who had only eight Greek manuscripts at hand.

Samaritan Pentateuch

The Samaritan Pentateuch is a version of the Torah written in Samaritan Hebrew dating to the Second Temple Period (516 BCE–70 CE). It came to the attention of European scholars in the seventeenth century, and subsequently has been used, along with the Masoretic Text, for translations of the Christian Old Testament.

Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea (or Qumran) Scrolls are a collection of Jewish manuscripts dating from the third century BCE to the first century CE. They were discovered between 1946–56 in caves in the Palestinian West Bank. They include the oldest surviving complete copies of several books of the Hebrew Bible, although most of the scrolls survive only as fragments. Study and publication of the scrolls are an ongoing process. Since their discovery, translators have used them, along with other source texts, for translations of the Christian Old Testament.

Old English Translations

There were a number of English translations of individual books of the Bible prior to the Norman Conquest but no translations of the complete Bible during that period. While these are the earliest translations of biblical books into English, in the textual genealogy of translation these are something of a dead end, as following the Norman Conquest they gradually became unreadable and forgotten.

Lindisfarne Gospels

London, British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV is an illuminated Vulgate version of the gospels thought to have been produced by Eadfirth (d. 721), the bishop of Lindisfarne, an island off the coast of Northumbria that housed a monastery. In the tenth century, someone added a word-for-word interlinear, Old English gloss to the Latin text. While it is a gloss rather than a full translation, it is complete and thus represents the oldest extant version of the gospels in English.

West Saxon Gospels

The four gospels were translated into the West Saxon dialect of Old English in the late tenth century.

Paris Psalter

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Fonds Latin 8824 is a complete Old English psalter (i.e., the book of Psalms). The manuscript dates to the mid eleventh century, but the translation probably dates to the late ninth century. The first fifty psalms are poetic translations, and the remaining one hundred psalms are in prose. The poetic translation of the psalms is often attributed to Alfred the Great, and while it is doubtful that he translated them himself, at least unaided, the creation of the psalter was likely done at his direction.

Old English Hexateuch and Heptateuch

The Old English Hexateuch is a translation of the first six books of the Christian Old Testament (the Pentateuch plus Joshua). The translation was produced over the course of the late tenth to early eleventh centuries. The Hexateuch survives in seven manuscripts, most of them fragmentary. Ælfric of Eynsham (d. c. 1010) translated the first portion of Genesis and may have played a role in the overall editing and production of the early translations. And Byrhtferth of Ramsay (c. 970–c. 1020) may have been responsible for partially translating and compiling London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius B.iv. One manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 509, also contains the book of Judges; hence it is known as the Old English Heptateuch.

Old English Biblical Poems

Poetic versions of portions of a number of biblical books were composed in Old English. These are not strictly “translations” as we commonly use that term today, but rather poetic interpretations. These include poems based on passages from Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, as well as poems about Christ from the gospels.

Wycliffite (Middle English) Translations

John Wycliffe (c. 1328–84) was an English Roman Catholic priest and theologian who, along with others who shared his reformist views, translated portions of the Vulgate into Middle English. Wycliffe was a proto-Protestant reformer of the Catholic Church. Over 250 Wycliffite manuscripts by Wycliffe and his followers survive, of which 20 are of the entire Bible—the first complete translations of the Bible into English. These are also known as Lollard Bibles, Lollardy being a popular name for the reformist movement with which Wycliffe was associated. Wycliffe was posthumously declared to have been a heretic and his works ordered to be burned, although, as the number of manuscripts that survive attest, that last order was not terribly successful. Unlike the earlier Old English translations which were largely forgotten after the Norman Conquest, Wycliffite Bibles would form the basis for many subsequent biblical translations.

Early Modern Translations

Most Early Modern translations of the Bible into English were Protestant endeavors. The early ones were done in opposition to the official, Roman Catholic hierarchy, while the later ones, done after Henry VIII’s split from the Catholic church, were sometimes done under the auspices of the new Anglican officialdom.

Tyndale’s Translations (Coverdale Bible)

While he himself never published a complete Bible, William Tyndale’s (c. 1494–1536) translations of biblical books into English may be the most important from the perspective of the history of the language. Many later translations of the books that Tyndale translated, including those in the King James Version, are essentially revisions of Tyndale’s work. Tyndale’s translations were primarily based on the Vulgate, but he was the first anglophone translator to consult the Greek and Hebrew originals, that is Erasmus’s Textus Receptus for the Greek New Testament and Hebrew sources for the Pentateuch. Between c. 1522–35 Tyndale translated and published the New Testament, the Pentateuch, the historical books of the Old Testament, and the book of Jonah. Tyndale, who worked in the Netherlands, was arrested in 1535 and executed the following year for being a “Lutheran,” not specifically for translating the Bible, which was not illegal in the Netherlands.

In 1535, Myles Coverdale, working from Martin Luther’s German translations and from the Vulgate, completed Tyndale’s translation project and published the first complete, printed (i.e., not handwritten manuscript) Bible, including the Apocrypha, in English. In 1539, Coverdale also published the Great Bible, the first authorized English Bible. This edition contained revisions of passages from his 1535 edition that Henry VIII and the new Anglican hierarchy had found objectionable.

Geneva Bible

With the return of Catholicism to England under the reign of Mary I (r. 1553–58), earlier translations of the Bible were suppressed, resulting in a new translation being produced in Geneva, Switzerland by Calvinist scholars. This translation, and especially the accompanying annotations, is Calvinist in tone and doctrine. It is based on Tyndale’s translations with new translations of the remaining books from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts. The New Testament was published in 1557 and the complete Bible in 1560.

The Bishop’s Bible

The restoration of the Church of England under Elizabeth I required a new translation, as the Presbyterianism of the annotations in the Geneva Bible, especially those concerning church polity, did not suit the Anglican church. The so-called Bishop’s Bible was published in 1568 and substantially revised in 1572, with a final edition published in 1602. While it was the Bible used in Anglican churches, the Geneva Bible remained popular and in print. The Bishop’s Bible’s most significant legacy is that it was used as the base text for the King James Version.

King James Version (Authorized Version)

Since the Geneva Bible continued to be in unofficial, widespread use, Anglican authorities decided a new translation was required to combat the threat of Calvinist Puritanism. As a result, the King James Version was published in 1611. The translation used the Bishop’s Bible as the base text, supplemented with consultation of the Textus Receptus for the New Testament, the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint for the Old, and the Vulgate for some books of the Apocrypha.

One particular 1631 printing of the KJV became known as the Wicked Bible because, due to a printer error (or practical joke), Exodus 20:14 read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

The KJV was revised in 1769 and again between 1881–94.

Despite its language being rather archaic to present-day readers, the KJV is widely praised for its literary style, although many of its literary innovations attributed to it can actually be traced to Tyndale. It remains in widespread use today, especially among evangelical Protestants.

Note that while, contrary to a popular belief, King James I ordered the translation, he had almost nothing to do with the actual translation. His only substantive contribution to the translation was commanding that it contain no marginal notes and that it use phrasing that reflected the episcopal structure of the Anglican church, such as church as opposed to congregation and priest as opposed to elder—a response to Presbyterianism of the Geneva Bible.

Douay-Rheims Bible

The Douay-Rheims Bible is a translation of the Vulgate into English, a product of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. The New Testament portion was first published in Rheims in 1582. It was followed by the Old Testament, published in Douay from 1609–10. It has been revised multiple times since, most notably by Bishop Richard Challoner between 1749–52. Other, later translations have overtaken it in popularity among many anglophone Catholics, but the Challoner revision remains the most popular in the more traditional Catholic circles.

Modern Translations

The following is just a sampling of the more popular translations out there. There are many others.

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NSRVUE)

The NSRVUE is a 2021 update to the 1989 NRSV, which in turn is a revision of the 1952 RSV. It is based on the latest critical editions of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek source manuscripts. (The original RSV was the first English translation to make use of the Dead Sea Scrolls). The intent was to create a readable and accurate translation that would appeal to as many Christian denominations as possible. The NSRVUE is widely regarded as the most scholarly and accurate of the English translations. Its editorial policy is to use gender-inclusive language where it does not misrepresent the patriarchal nature of ancient societies, which limits its appeal among more conservative circles.

The NRSVUE is widely used among mainline Protestant denominations in the United States and Canada. The Roman Catholic editions are approved for use by that church.

New International Version (NIV)

The NIV was first published in 1978 and underwent a major revision in 2011. The intent behind the NIV was to produce a translation in Present-Day English to replace the King James Version. The NIV is based on critical editions of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek source manuscripts. Editions using gender-inclusive language were published in Britain in the 1990s but were not made available in the US because of opposition by conservative Christians. The UK gender-inclusive editions were discontinued with the publication of the 2011 revision, which used some, but not all, of the gender-inclusive language of the earlier UK editions.

The NIV is perhaps the bestselling versions of the Christian Bible today, although it has been rejected by the Southern Baptist Convention for its gender-inclusive language and it does not include the Apocrypha, making it unsuitable for Roman Catholic and Orthodox readers. It is praised for its readability, but that readability sometimes comes at a cost to scholarly accuracy.

New King James Version (NKJV)

Published in 1982, this is a modernization of the KJV that replaces archaic and inaccurate terms, while retaining the style and tone of the original. While more readable than the original KJV, it is still formal and stilted in style, and it does not take into account modern scholarship on the manuscript sources.

English Standard Version (ESV)

Published in 2001, with a revision in 2016, the ESV is an evangelical update of the RSV that avoids the gender-neutral locutions of the NRSV. The scholarship and language are somewhat outdated, but it is popular among evangelical denominations.

Which Translation to Use?

There is no “best” translation of the Bible. The choice of which translation is appropriate depends on the circumstances and context. For instance, I mentioned that I frequently refer to the Vulgate on Wordorigins.org, as that would have been the Bible familiar to most medieval English people. If working in a later period, perhaps the KJV would be more appropriate. If one wishes a translation that adheres most closely to the scholarly understanding of the oldest extant, original-language manuscripts, then the NSRVUE is probably the best choice. And if one wishes to find a translation for devotional use, then one where the aims of the translators tend to be in line with one’s theological outlook would probably be most useful.

Image credit: Unknown artist, c. 715 CE. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.iv, fol. 93v. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

1,000th Revision (sort of)

13 October 2025

Numbers with lots of zeroes after them seem to have significance, even if they don’t really. Back in March 2020, in the midst of the Covid lockdown, I started a wholesale revision of the Wordorigins.org Big List. Some of the entries were very old, dating to the 1990s. And today, I posted the entry that in my internal list is numbered 1,000, that is the entry for Mecca. In the revising, I went year by year, starting with the oldest entries, and within a particular year roughly alphabetically. Currently, I’m updating entries that were first posted in 2019.

Mecca is not, however, actually the 1,000th revision. There are new entries in that count. And at times, I drafted entries that jumped the queue, being assigned an additional letter so that I didn’t have to renumber the entire list (like 927a conclave). And I’ve even started to revise some of the new entries I added since the revision project started. (Calvinball is both 802a and 997.) So there have been more than 1,000 posts to the Big List since I started the revision project. But the ticking over onto 1,000 seems like a good opportunity to give an update on the project, even if it isn’t actually the 1,000th post since it started.

If I keep to the current pace with no unplanned new entries, I’ll post the last revision (notorious) on 9 March 2026, some six years after starting. And true to form, that won’t actually be the last revision, just the last one as part of the wholesale revision project. I’ll keep updating individual entries as needed. This will be the last (and only) time I attempt such a complete revision.

I’m also thinking about how to best archive the site. While I have no plans to stop, there will come a time when I am no longer able or willing to keep the site up to date, both in terms of content and software infrastructure. I could just leave it to Archive.org’s “Way Back Machine,” but I’m contemplating if there should be a backup to that. Currently my thinking is to just create a giant PDF file (or files) of all the content, which will be fairly effortless on my part. The PDF format, since it is so ubiquitous, should remain readable for decades to come. Even if Adobe goes under, which doesn’t seem likely anytime soon, someone will maintain a PDF reader. If anyone has any ideas on this front, please let me know.

I asked ChatGPT…

Drawing of a human brain superimposed upon the circuitry of a computer chip

TL;DR: ChatGPT’s Research AI is fundamentally flawed. It misleads and hallucinates, only scratches the surface of what information is available, and ends up creating more work for the researcher than if they had just started from scratch on their own.

I set out to test ChatGPT’s Research AI to see how useful it might be in researching the history of words and phrases. There have been numerous examples in the news of late of the failure of a large language model algorithm (LLM) to accurately convey information, perhaps most notably US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. releasing a report, apparently generated at least in part by an LLM, that contained bogus source citations. My findings do not put ChatGPT’s Research AI in a good light, at least for the purposes it is being touted for.

This was a test of a large language model (LLM) for a particular purpose for which it is being touted by those selling it. LLMs may function well at other tasks, and my little test says nothing about other types of so-called artificial intelligence (AI) used for other purposes, such as image analysis tools.

I must note that what I did was not a thorough or controlled test. I was essentially just playing around with the tool. Still, what I found convinced me that constructing and conducting a thorough test would be a waste of time. When one finds fundamental errors and misinformation on one’s first “back-of the-envelope” test, that does not bode well for success in a more rigorous examination. (Which is not to say that a more thorough and rigorous test would not be welcome, just that I’m not going to bother myself.) I do think that this test is enough to conclude that one should not use ChatGPT’s Research AI or rely upon the LLM-generated summaries provided by Google and other search engines, at least until more comprehensive tests on a future, improved version show that it is reliable. I don’t, however, believe this is possible given the architecture of LLMs; the errors they produce are fundamental to and result from their design.

First, ChatGPT’s Research AI does not truly conduct “research,” in that it doesn’t create new knowledge. It is essentially a tool for literature review, finding out what others have already discovered. That is not in and of itself a bad thing—literature review is an essential function—but the label of “research” is misleading in that implies that the tool is pushing the boundaries of what is known.

I ran two separate tests of the tool. The first was to ask the origin of the word firework, the second the phrase agree to disagree. The prompts and complete LLM responses can be found below. I chose those two terms because I had written draft website entries for them, but as of the time of the test I had not published them. So I would have something to compare the LLM’s results with, but my work would not be available to the LLM and there would be no possibility of my work “contaminating” the LLM’s results.

The results of my two tests were inconsistent, with the tool performing better on one test than on the other.

On 28 May 2025, I prompted the ChatGPT Research AI to find the origin of the word firework with the following:

What is the origin of the word “firework”? Include multiple examples of early use for various senses and footnotes and bibliography in Chicago style.

(ChatGPT’s responses in full are available below.)

First, the LLM got the etymology wrong. While it correctly identified the word as a compound, it said it was “likely borrowed from similar constructs in European languages—particularly Italian fuochi artificiali (“artificial fires”) or German Feuerwerk.” This is wrong; it was most likely compounded within English.

It also said, “the earliest known usage of firework dates to 1575, and it initially referred specifically to pyrotechnic displays.” Again, this is wrong. The word dates to nearly a half century earlier, and the original sense is that of combustibles and explosives used by the military. The sense of a pyrotechnic display came later.

Then we move to the examples of use. The first, allegedly sourced from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), was “1575 — ‘There were great fyre workes shewed upon the Thames.’” But the first citation in the OED is from 1528, and as far as I can tell the quotation the LLM gave is a hallucination, although the quotation may exist in some early-modern text that is unavailable to me using the resources of the Princeton University library. The bibliography claims the LLM accessed the OED on 28 May 2025, the day I asked the question. Clearly, it did not.

The second example is allegedly from George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. The citation is dated 1691, although Puttenham’s book was published two years earlier. The LLM’s dating is also internally inconsistent: while the text gives the date as 1691, both the footnote and bibliography give the correct date for the work, 1689. And again, the LLM hallucinated the quotation; Puttenham’s book doesn’t use the word fireworks.

The next example given is in a military context. The author, Henry Hexham, did indeed write about military affairs in the period, but as far as I can tell the book, a 1625 text titled A Treatise of the Art of Warre, does not exist.

The last example of use is in the figurative sense, allegedly taken from John Milton’s 1671 Paradise Regained. At least this time the book is real; the quotation, however, is not.

Finally, the LLM notes, “By the 18th century, ‘fireworks’ had also come to denote a spectacle or a display of emotion, often intense or dramatic.” Again this is incorrect. This figurative sense was in place at the start of the seventeenth century.

The second test was to find the origin of the phrase agree to disagree. The LLM did much better at this one. There were no hallucinations, and it did not fall for the common belief that the phrase was coined by theologian John Wesley. The information it provided was essentially correct; the only “errors” I found was giving a first citation of 1608, when the earliest I have found is 1601, and the quotation from Wycherley does not cite the earliest edition of the poem. These are not disqualifying.

The chief problem with this second response is it did not format the notes or bibliography in Chicago style, as requested. Page numbers and other critical information were missing from the scholarly apparatus, making it difficult to find the sources being referenced. This sounds like a quibble, but it is significant. The purpose of source citations is to allow readers to locate the original information; if page numbers are not provided, this task becomes difficult, if not all but impossible. Also, formatting source citations to conform with a particular published style is something that LLMs should perform nearly flawlessly but that this current iteration of ChatGPT's Research AI cannot accomplish.

A lesser, but highly revealing, problem is the type of sources cited. It seems that all of the primary source citations were gleaned via two articles, a blog post and a newspaper article. While in this particular case both of these were well researched, that is not always the case with blogs and newspapers. They should not be the go-to secondary sources for serious research, used only upon careful assessment of their quality. In this instance the LLM was fortunate in stumbling upon two good ones. I say fortunate, because the hallucinations in the first test make it clear that the LLM is incapable of assessing information quality.

The question arises is why did the LLM fail so miserably on the one task, yet do a decent job on the other? While LLM is a black box and the answer cannot be known for certain, I think the answer lies in the two terms chosen. The term firework has little online commentary about its origin, while there is extensive commentary about the origin of agree to disagree (most of it centered on the belief that Wesley coined it). And, indeed, all the information and quotations provided in this second response can be found in the two secondary sources that the LLM cited. So when it has information that is succinctly and correctly stated in a readily available source (e.g., a blog post or Wikipedia), the LLM does a reasonable job. But when it needs to assemble a response on its own, it falls into hallucination and error.

From this brief test, it is clear that ChatGPT’s Research AI is worse than useless in the tasks it is being touted for. It is actively misleading. This should not be a surprise. Large language models (LLMs) are essentially predictive text engines, determining what is the most statistically likely word to follow. They are not “intelligent” in any sense of that word. They have no knowledge of the real world or what is true or false, fact or fiction. As a result, I do not believe it is possible to create an LLM that can perform this function adequately. Not only are the answers it produces not to be trusted as correct, those answers are not even internally consistent within the same response, as the different dates given for Puttenham’s work show.

Discuss this post

Image credit: Unknown creator, 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

 The prompts and responses follow:

 

First Prompt to ChatGPT’s Research AI:

What is the origin of the word "firework"? Include multiple examples of early use for various senses and footnotes and bibliography in Chicago style.

ChatGPT’s response:

The word "firework" has an intriguing etymology that traces back to the early modern English period, and its development reflects both the literal and figurative senses in which it has been used over time. Here's a detailed breakdown of its origin, historical usage, and references in Chicago style.

Origin and Etymology

The English word “firework” is a compound of “fire” and “work,” following the common practice in Germanic and Romance languages of forming compounds to describe man-made contrivances involving fire. The term appears in English in the late 16th century, likely borrowed from similar constructs in European languages—particularly Italian fuochi artificiali ("artificial fires") or German Feuerwerk.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the earliest known usage of firework dates to 1575, and it initially referred specifically to pyrotechnic displays.

Examples of Early Use

1. Literal Sense: Explosive Display

  • 1575 – “There were great fyre workes shewed upon the Thames.”1
    This is among the earliest known usages, documenting a pyrotechnic celebration held for Queen Elizabeth I. The spelling reflects the orthographic conventions of the period.

  • 1591 – George Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie, refers to “artificiall fires and fireworks,” demonstrating that the term had entered broader descriptive vocabulary by the end of the 16th century.2

2. Military and Technical Context

  • 1625 – In A Treatise of the Art of Warre by Henry Hexham, we find mention of “diverse sorts of fireworks used in assault.”3
    Here, the term applies to military pyrotechnics, such as incendiary devices and signal flares.

3. Figurative Sense

  • 1671 – John Milton’s Paradise Regained includes a metaphorical use: “Flames of zeal... not fireworks for the eyes.”4
    This marks one of the earliest known figurative uses, contrasting superficial spectacle with spiritual intensity.

Development of Senses

By the 18th century, "fireworks" had also come to denote a spectacle or a display of emotion, often intense or dramatic. This figurative usage still persists today, as in “There were fireworks during the debate.”

Conclusion

The term firework has evolved from its initial technical and celebratory meanings to encompass broader metaphorical connotations. Its roots lie in European traditions of pyrotechnic display, and its usage in English reflects both cultural practices and linguistic borrowings.

Footnotes

Bibliography

  • Hexham, Henry. A Treatise of the Art of Warre. London: M. Flesher, 1625.

  • Milton, John. Paradise Regained. In The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, edited by William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen Fallon, 543. New York: Modern Library, 2007.

  • Oxford English Dictionary. “Firework.” Accessed May 28, 2025. https://www.oed.com.

  • Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. London: Richard Field, 1589.

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Footnotes

  1. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “firework,” accessed May 28, 2025, https://www.oed.com.

  2. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), 135.

  3. Henry Hexham, A Treatise of the Art of Warre (London: M. Flesher, 1625), 74.

  4. John Milton, Paradise Regained, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 543.

 

 

Second Prompt to ChatGPT’s Research AI:

What is the origin of the phrase “agree to disagree”? Include multiple examples of early use for various senses and footnotes and bibliography in Chicago style.

ChatGPT’s response:

Origin and Early Usage of “Agree to Disagree”

Historical Development

  • 1608 – James Anderton (alias John Brereley)

    • In The Protestants Apologie for the Roman Church, Anderton writes:

“And as our learned adversaries do thus agree to disagree in their owne translations, mutually condemning (as before) each other...”

    • This usage lacks the modern connotation of mutual tolerance and instead highlights conflicting viewpoints among Protestant scholars.
      https://wjdw.nl/2019/04/12/was-john-wesley-the-first-to-put-the-phrase-agree-to-disagree-in-print/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

  • 1704 – John Piggott

    • In his sermon On Union and Peace, Piggott states:

“And now why should we not agree to differ, without either enmity or scorn?”

    • This reflects an early sentiment of amicable disagreement.
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agree_to_disagree?utm_source=chatgpt.com

  • 1706 – William Wycherley

    • In the poem An Epithalamium on the Marriage of Two very Ill Natur’d Blacks, Wycherley writes:

“Who, like Black Fiends, agree to disagree, | Each other’s Torment, out of Love to be.”

    • This usage suggests a mutual, albeit contentious, relationship.
      https://wjdw.nl/2019/04/12/was-john-wesley-the-first-to-put-the-phrase-agree-to-disagree-in-print/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

  • 1750 – George Whitefield

    • In a letter dated June 29, 1750, Whitefield remarks:

“After all, those who will live in peace must agree to disagree in many things with their fellow-labourers, and not let little things part or disunite them.”

    • This reflects the modern sense of maintaining harmony despite differences.
      https://wjdw.nl/2019/04/12/was-john-wesley-the-first-to-put-the-phrase-agree-to-disagree-in-print/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

  • 1770 – John Wesley

    • In his sermon On the Death of Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, Wesley states:

“There are many doctrines of a less essential nature ... In these we may think and let think; we may 'agree to disagree.' But, meantime, let us hold fast the essentials...”

    • Wesley attributes the phrase to Whitefield, indicating its prior usage.
      https://www.southernstandard.com/opinions/where-did-that-come-from-agree-to-disagree/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agree_to_disagree?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Footnotes

  1. James Anderton (as John Brereley), The Protestants Apologie for the Roman Church, 1608.

  2. John Piggott, Eleven Sermons, 1714, p. 290.

  3. William Wycherley, Miscellany Poems, 1706, p. 432.

  4. George Whitefield, Letter to Mr. B., June 29, 1750.

  5. John Wesley, A Sermon on the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1770.
    https://wjdw.nl/2019/04/12/was-john-wesley-the-first-to-put-the-phrase-agree-to-disagree-in-print/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agree_to_disagree?utm_source=chatgpt.com
    https://www.southernstandard.com/opinions/where-did-that-come-from-agree-to-disagree/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Bibliography (Chicago Style)

  • Anderton, James (as John Brereley). The Protestants Apologie for the Roman Church. 1608.

  • Piggott, John. Eleven Sermons. London: 1714.

  • Wycherley, William. Miscellany Poems. London: Jeffery Wale, 1706.

  • Whitefield, George. Letter to Mr. B., June 29, 1750.

  • Wesley, John. A Sermon on the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield. London: J. and W. Oliver, 1770.

Further Exploration

  • Investigate the evolution of the phrase's meaning over time.

  • Compare with similar expressions like "agree to differ."

  • Examine the phrase's usage in contemporary discourse.