A Walk in the WoRds

From the Grey Poupon YouTube page: "GREY POUPON began in 1777 in Dijon, France, when Maurice Grey met his associate, Auguste Poupo...

Earlier this month, Wayne State University's Word Warriors released its fourth annual list of "eminently useful words that should b...

In a post last year I referenced an article in the New York Times that explained the acronym-based etymology of the word Captcha and told ...

clipping , n.2 c. The shortening of a word, etc.; also, the resulting shortened form. Many people are of the belief that till is a shortene...

Brought to you by Slate , inspired by Rick Perry. Oops: A History When did we come up with a word for making mistakes? By Forrest Wickman Du...

Check out this New York Times article titled " Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time ." Not only does it provide...

Following is a rebus-like variation of a well-known idiom. Can you guess what it is? ull ou all the sos. Here is a pictographic hint. And...

When a pair of words has entered a language through different routes and each of the words came from the same etymological root the words ar...

GO RED WINGS Well the big game is tonight and last year I posted about the semantics of sports award names in honor of The Stanley Cup Pla...

There are numerous word types that by semantic definition are hard to define without context. Included in this category are polysemes and ho...

The other day my son asked me why we say "a pair of pants" when pants are only one thing. Of course I immediately said it is be...

An article in the winter 2008 - 2009 issue of American Educator contains some very interesting statistics regarding spelling in English. 50%...

Pragmatics ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ETYMOLOGY Just in case any readers are not fa...

A good friend and I were tossing around some words recently and she mentioned the word paregoric . Though the word is not commonly used out...

Celebrating The 4th of July The 4th of July is noted for its fireworks, barbecues and parades. Originally called rockets , the term firewor...

Returning to yesterday's post, the phrase pet peeve is an interesting one and I started to wonder how it came about. The word peeve a...

What a great time of year it is for word, vocabulary, etymology and spelling lovers. The Scripps National Spelling Bee begins today. Yes, I ...

At the suggestion of one of my readers (Hello Ryn), tomorrow I plan to discuss the origins of some phrases in English that make reference to...