Latest posts:
Coming soon:
yttrium
reindeer
merry
zinc
poinsettia
calcium
Epiphany / Twelfth Night
gold
luxury
soap opera / horse opera / space opera
ruthenium
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.
*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.
—Dave Wilton
