the curious origin of ‘pie’ (baked dish)
perhaps identical to ‘pie’ (‘magpie’)—variety of ingredients maybe associated with bird’s spotted appearance or its tendency to collect miscellaneous articles
Read Moreorigin of the word ‘captcha’
early 21st century—acronym from ‘Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’, with punning allusion to ‘capture’ and ‘gotcha’
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘j’accuse’
1899—public accusation in response to a perceived injustice—from the title of an open letter (1898) by Émile Zola, condemning the imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus
Read Morethe liturgical origin of ‘Quasimodo’
in full ‘Quasimodo Sunday’: the Sunday after Easter—from the opening words of the Latin introit for that day, ‘quasimodo geniti infantes’, ‘as newborn babies’
Read Moreoriginal meaning of ‘cretin’: ‘Christian’, ‘human being’
Swiss-French ‘crestin’ (= ‘Christian’): in certain valleys of the Alps, a mentally deficient, deformed person suffering from a congenital thyroid deficiency
Read More‘Mediterranean’: the sea in the middle of the earth
from Latin ‘mare Mediterraneum’, ‘the sea in the middle of the earth’—Latin ‘mediterrāneus’, from Greek ‘mesόgaios’, ‘situated in the middle of the land’
Read More‘ladybird’: the Virgin Mary’s beetle
The ladybird was so named on account of its seven spots, which were popularly believed to symbolise the seven sorrows of the Virgin Mary.
Read Moreearly instances of ‘butterfly kiss’
‘Butterfly kiss’ appeared in the second half of the 19th century to designate the act of lightly sweeping a person’s cheek with one’s eyelashes.
Read Morethe changing identities of the butterfly
Since antiquity, European languages have variously named the butterfly, in particular by using sound reduplications expressive of its fluttering.
Read Morethe creation of the word ‘folklore’
The word ‘folklore’ was coined in 1846 by the British author William John Thoms, inspired by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s anthology of German fairy tales.
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word histories 