“ad fontes!”
Australia—‘charity dame’ 1949—‘charity moll’ 1962—an amateur prostitute who charges less than the usual rate—from ‘Moll’, pet form of the female forename ‘Mary’, the noun ‘moll’ has long been used to designate a prostitute
Read Moreoriginally a kind of horse chase in which the second horse had to follow the course of the leader, like a flight of wild geese
Read More‘slipshod’: ‘characterised by a lack of care, thought or organisation’—formed after the obsolete noun ‘slip-shoe’ (= ‘a loosely fitting shoe or slipper’); ‘shod’ (meaning ‘wearing shoes’) is the past participle of the verb ‘shoe’
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original meaning of ‘kidnap’, late 17th century—to steal or carry off children or others in order to provide servants or labourers for the American plantations
Read More‘maudlin’: tearfully sentimental – from the Middle-English name ‘Maudelen’, designating Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus, customarily represented as weeping
Read MoreThe proverb (what’s) one man’s meat is another (man)’s poison means that things liked or enjoyed by one person may be distasteful to another. In this proverb, meat has its original sense of food in general, anything used as nourishment, solid food as opposed to drink. This original sense survives in sweetmeat and in the phrase […]
Read MoreIn The Tragedie of Macbeth (around 1603), by the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Gray-Malkin is the name of a fiend in the shape of a grey she-cat, the cat being the form most generally assumed by the familiar spirits of witches according to a common superstition: (Folio 1, 1623) […]
Read MoreMEANINGS – the last part of something, especially when regarded as less important or interesting – British, informal: a cigarette end ORIGIN The obsolete adjective flag, attested in the late 16th century, meant flabby, hanging down. It was either an onomatopoeic formation or, via Middle French flac, from Latin flaccus, of same […]
Read MoreSexual puns in 17th-century English theatre explain several meanings of ‘P’s and Q’s’.
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word histories 