99 Fun Facts About Word

The word 'trivia' comes from Latin 'triviae', which literally meant what?

A spot where three roads met was a public place, so 'trivialis' came to mean commonplace; the modern quiz sense dates only from 1960s college contests.

Bread with a filling is named after an 18th-century English aristocrat with what title?

John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, reputedly asked for meat between bread so he could keep gaming without leaving the table, and the dish took his title.

'Quarantine' comes from the Venetian word for what period of time?

Forty days was how long Venice made ships from plague-stricken ports wait offshore, so any hidden cases aboard would show before anyone landed.

The word 'salary' derives from the Latin word for which substance?

Salt: Latin 'salarium' comes from 'sal', though the popular claim that Roman soldiers were paid in salt is unsupported by ancient texts.

Which English word's second half comes from an Old English goblin said to sit on sleepers' chests?

Nightmare: its 'mare' was that goblin, unrelated to the horse, and the word only came to mean any bad dream in the 1820s.

The word 'robot' entered English from a 1920 play written in which language?

Karel Čapek's Czech play R.U.R. (1920) introduced 'robot'; he credited his brother Josef with coining it from 'robota', the Czech word for forced labour.

'Sabotage' comes from a French word for what item?

'Sabot' is a French wooden shoe; 'saboter' first meant to clatter in clogs or bungle work, and the tale of workers throwing shoes into machinery is probably apocryphal.

Which food's name traces back to a Nahuatl word that also meant testicle?

Avocado: testicle was only a secondary sense of Nahuatl 'ahuacatl', which first meant the fruit, so avocados weren't named after testicles.

'Muscle' comes from the Latin 'musculus', meaning what?

Little mouse: a flexed biceps was thought to look like a mouse moving under the skin, and Greek 'mys' also meant both mouse and muscle.

Which president's supporters formed 'O.K. Clubs' in 1840, playing on his nickname 'Old Kinderhook'?

Martin Van Buren's backers borrowed 'OK' from Boston newspapers, where it had begun in 1839 as a joke abbreviation of 'oll korrect'.

What is the name for the dot above a lowercase i or j?

The tittle is the small dot above lowercase i and j; the word survives in the biblical phrase 'one jot or one tittle' (Matthew 5:18).

Which famously long word means 'the act of estimating something as worthless'?

'Floccinaucinihilipilification' strings together Latin words for 'nothing' (flocci, nauci, nihili, pili); William Shenstone used it in a 1741 letter.

Roughly how many letters long is the full chemical name of the protein titin?

189,800 is close: titin's full chemical name runs to 189,819 letters, and it is sometimes called the longest word in any language.

Which island completes the palindrome 'Able was I ere I saw…', often attributed to Napoleon?

Elba spells 'able' backwards, so the line gets pinned on Napoleon, who was exiled there in 1814 and escaped less than a year later.

'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is the best-known English example of what?

A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet, and in the novel Ella Minnow Pea an island's council bans each letter that falls from a monument bearing this sentence.

'Brunch' and 'smog' are examples of what kind of word?

Portmanteaus were popularised by Lewis Carroll through Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, who explains 'slithy' as lithe plus slimy.

'Boycott' is named after Captain Charles Boycott, a land agent shunned in which country in 1880?

Boycott was a land agent in County Mayo, Ireland; Charles Stewart Parnell urged the Land League to shun such men, and the surname became a verb within months.

A penny-pinching French finance minister of 1759 gave his name to which English word?

Silhouette: Étienne de Silhouette's petty wartime economies made his name mean 'cheap', so it stuck to the inexpensive cut-paper shadow portrait.

A word like 'cleave' or 'sanction' that can mean its own opposite is called what?

A contronym (also 'Janus word', after the two-faced Roman god) carries opposite senses: 'cleave' means both split and cling, 'sanction' both permit and penalise.

Which fruit is the classic example of an English word with no perfect rhyme?

Orange has no true rhyme among common English words, though the Blorenge, a mountain in Wales, is one of the few names that fits.

A 'murder' is the famous collective noun for a group of which birds?

Crows: 'a murder' is one of the medieval 'terms of venery', fanciful names for animal groups such as a 'gaggle' of geese.

Which American architect invented Scrabble, valuing letters by their frequency in newspapers?

Alfred Mosher Butts, then an out-of-work architect, counted letters on The New York Times front page, and James Brunot later renamed his game Scrabble.

Which two letters are worth 10 points each in English Scrabble?

Q and Z score 10 because they are among the rarest letters in English, while vowels and common letters such as L, N, R, S and T score 1.

Wordle was created by a Welsh software engineer with what surname?

Josh Wardle made the game for his partner, Palak Shah, and The New York Times bought it in January 2022 for a 'low seven-figure' sum.

In Wordle's standard colours, which tile colour marks a correct letter in the wrong spot?

Yellow means right letter, wrong spot, and the shareable grid of those coloured squares is what made Wordle go viral in late 2021.

Which author's first job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary?

Tolkien researched words beginning with W, then left in 1920 to become Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds.

Which children's author gave us the first recorded use of the word 'nerd', in 1950?

Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo (1950) lists a 'Nerd' among the creatures Gerald McGrew wants to collect; the slang sense surfaced in Newsweek the next year.

Which author introduced the words 'doublethink' and 'Big Brother' in a 1949 novel?

George Orwell introduced both in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and his own name became the adjective 'Orwellian' for totalitarian social practices.

The ampersand was once commonly recited as the 27th letter of what?

The English alphabet was once recited ending '…X, Y, Z, and per se and', which children slurred into the word 'ampersand'.

The placeholder text 'Lorem ipsum' is a scrambled passage from which Roman writer?

The passage is mangled from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum (45 BC), as Richard McClintock showed; Letraset transfer sheets made it standard in the 1960s.

'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' comes from which 1964 film?

The Sherman Brothers wrote it for Mary Poppins (1964), sung by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke; it placed 36th on the AFI's list of top film songs.

The respelling 'ghoti', used to mock English spelling, is meant to be pronounced like which word?

'Ghoti' spells 'fish': gh as in 'enough', o as in 'women', ti as in 'nation'; the joke is often credited to George Bernard Shaw but predates him.

Which word for swapped sounds, as in 'a blushing crow' for 'a crushing blow', honours an Oxford don?

A spoonerism is named after William Archibald Spooner of New College, Oxford, though many of the slips pinned on him were invented by others.

Which Sheridan character's ridiculous misuse of long words gave English a name for such slips?

Mrs. Malaprop, from The Rivals (1775), takes her name from French 'mal à propos', meaning 'inappropriately'.

The word 'mondegreen' comes from a mishearing of a line in what kind of song?

A Scottish ballad: young Sylvia Wright heard 'laid him on the green' as 'Lady Mondegreen', and coined the word in a 1954 essay.

'Onomatopoeia' comes from a Greek compound meaning what?

Greek 'onoma' (name) plus 'poiein' (to make) gives 'name-making', coining a word from a sound, as in 'buzz', 'hiss' and 'cuckoo'.

'Bankrupt' comes from the Italian 'banca rotta', which means what?

Broken bench: 'banca' was a moneylender's counter, and the story of smashing a defaulter's bench is only alleged, perhaps just a figure of speech.

'Dord', printed in a 1934 American dictionary, is famous as what?

A ghost word created by an editing error: the slip 'D or d', abbreviations for density, was typeset and defined as one word.

Which organisation has chosen a Word of the Year since 1990, making its list the oldest in English?

The American Dialect Society votes at its annual January conference, and after astronomers demoted Pluto it named 'plutoed' the word of 2006.

Which dictionary maker championed American spellings like 'color' and 'center'?

Noah Webster pushed spelling reform for nationalistic as well as practical reasons, and his 1828 American Dictionary fixed forms such as 'color'.

'Whisky' derives from the Gaelic 'uisce beatha', a translation of which Latin phrase?

Aqua vitae (water of life) was the Latin name for distilled spirit, and Scotland's first record of whisky-making is malt given to Friar John Cor to make it.

The interrobang combines a question mark with which other punctuation mark?

The interrobang fuses a question mark with an exclamation mark; American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed it in 1962 for surprised or rhetorical questions.

What do you call a word or phrase formed by rearranging all the letters of another, using each exactly once?

An anagram let Galileo announce his discovery of Saturn's strange shape in 1610 as a scrambled Latin sentence, staking his claim without revealing it.

Which everyday compliment meant 'foolish' in Middle English, from Latin 'nescius', ignorant?

Nice meant foolish for centuries before drifting through 'fussy' and 'precise' to 'agreeable' in the 1700s.

What is the term for a word that occurs only once within a text, or a language's entire written record?

Hapax legomenon is Greek for 'said once'; in large text collections around 40 to 60 percent of distinct words appear only a single time.

Splitting one word in two to insert another inside it, as in 'abso-blooming-lutely', is a figure of speech called what?

Tmesis comes from Greek for 'a cutting', and wedging a swear word inside another, as in 'abso-bloody-lutely', is the everyday English form.

The word 'acronym' combines '-nym' for name with the Greek root 'akro-', meaning what?

Height or tip: Greek 'akros' meant topmost or at the end, and the word 'acronym' itself only entered English in the 1940s.

Which 1516 coinage combines the Greek for 'no' and 'place'?

Thomas More coined 'Utopia' for his 1516 book from Greek 'ou' (not) and 'topos' (place), so his perfect island is literally 'nowhere'.

Which letter does Ernest Vincent Wright's 50,000-word novel Gadsby never use?

E, the most common letter in English, never appears, and Georges Perec's French novel La Disparition later pulled off the same trick.

Which greeting did Alexander Graham Bell suggest for answering the telephone, before Thomas Edison's 'hello' won out?

Ahoy began as a seafarers' call to signal a ship or catch a crew's attention. Bell wanted it as the standard telephone greeting, but callers took up 'hello' instead.

Which Japanese loanword, first recorded in 1977, is a clipped compound that literally means 'empty orchestra'?

Karaoke joins 'kara', empty, to a shortened 'ōkesutora', orchestra. Credit for the first machine is disputed: Japan's Daisuke Inoue and Roberto del Rosario of the Philippines are the names most often given.

Which name for 1 followed by 100 zeros was coined in 1920 by a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew?

Googol was the invention of Milton Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. The boy is also credited with naming the far larger googolplex.

Which English word for something menacing is simply the Latin for 'on the left side', the opposite of 'dexter'?

Sinister meant 'left' in Latin, and omens seen on the left hand came to be read as unlucky. Its opposite, dexter, gave English 'dexterity'.

Which word for an office-seeker comes from the Latin for 'white-robed', after the togas Romans wore when campaigning?

Candidate goes back to 'candidatus', white-robed. Roman office-seekers wore a gleaming toga, probably whitened with powdered chalk, presumably to signal pure intentions.

Which sporting venue's name comes from the Greek for 'to train naked', as ancient athletes did?

Gymnasium traces to 'gymnos', Greek for naked, through a verb meaning to train unclothed. English has used it for a place of exercise since the 1590s.

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary said which grain fed horses in England but 'supports the people' in Scotland?

Oats got one of the best-known jokes in Johnson's Dictionary. Unlike most modern lexicographers, he let humour or prejudice into quite a number of his definitions.

Unwanted email is called 'spam' after a 1970 sketch by which British comedy troupe, in which Vikings sing the word?

Monty Python set the sketch in a restaurant that has Spam, a tinned luncheon meat, in almost every dish. The chanting buries all other talk, much as junk mail buries an inbox.

Bluetooth wireless is named after Harald Bluetooth, a tenth-century king who united the tribes of which country?

Denmark was forged into a single kingdom by Harald. Intel's Jim Kardach proposed the name in 1997 to imply that the technology would unite communication protocols the same way.

Which word for an unstoppable force comes from a Hindu deity whose huge chariot is drawn through Puri each year?

Juggernaut is an English reshaping of Jagannath, 'lord of the world', a title of Krishna. Travellers' tales of devotees throwing themselves under the wagon's wheels gave the word its crushing sense.

Horace Walpole coined 'serendipity' from a fairy tale about the princes of Serendip, an old name for which island?

Sri Lanka was Serendip to Persian storytellers and Sarandib to Arab traders. Walpole's 1754 coinage honoured the tale's heroes, who constantly made lucky discoveries.

Which verb originally named a Roman army punishment in which one mutinous soldier in every ten was killed by lot?

Decimate comes from the Latin 'decem', ten. Since the 1660s it has been used more loosely, to the irritation of pedants, for destroying a large but indefinite number.

Which financial term comes from Old French words that literally mean 'dead pledge'?

Mortgage joins 'mort', dead, and 'gage', pledge. An old legal explanation runs that the pledged land was 'dead' to a borrower who failed to pay on the appointed day.

Which word for a sudden great misfortune comes from the Italian for 'ill-starred', a relic of belief in astrology?

Disaster pairs a pejorative prefix with 'astro', star. The sense is astrological: ruin blamed on the unfavourable position of a planet.

Which medical word comes from the Latin for 'cow', after Edward Jenner's work with a cattle disease?

Vaccine derives from 'vacca', the Latin for cow. Jenner publicised the technique around 1800: a mild case of cowpox left a person immune to smallpox afterwards.

Which word for a wild frenzy comes from Old Norse warriors and probably means 'clothed in a bearskin'?

Berserk reached English through Sir Walter Scott's 1822 novel The Pirate. Scott believed it described a warrior who fought bare of armour, a reading now largely abandoned.

Which word goes back to an Arabic nickname for a medieval sect that Crusaders linked to hashish?

Assassin derives from 'hashishin', a nickname for the Nizari Ismaili sect during the Crusades. There is no evidence that the medieval Ismailis actually used the drug.

Which word for an independent thinker comes from a Texas cattle owner who was notoriously lax about branding his calves?

Maverick was first ranch slang for a calf found without an owner's brand. The rancher's grandson Maury, an independent-minded Texas congressman, later coined 'gobbledygook'.

Which verb for holding someone spellbound honours an 18th-century physician who claimed to heal with 'animal magnetism'?

Mesmerize is a back-formation from mesmerism, named for Franz Anton Mesmer. He set out his theory of a mysterious body fluid in Paris in 1778.

Which word for sudden terror comes from the Greek god of woods and fields, blamed for eerie sounds in lonely places?

Panic literally means 'pertaining to Pan'. The god's mysterious noises were said to set off contagious, groundless fear in herds and crowds.

Which branch of maths takes its name from an Arabic word in the title of al-Khwarizmi's ninth-century Baghdad treatise?

Algebra comes from 'al-jabr', reuniting or restoring, one step in solving an equation. The author's own name, mangled in medieval Latin, gave English the word 'algorithm'.

Which bathroom word comes from a Hindi verb meaning 'to press or knead', and first meant a massage in English?

Shampoo arrived through Anglo-Indian usage in 1762, meaning to rub the body to restore tone and vigour. The sense of lathering the hair is not recorded until about 1860.

Which word for a gleeful laugh did Lewis Carroll coin in Through the Looking-Glass, perhaps by blending two other words?

Chortle is thought to fuse 'chuckle' and 'snort'. It first appeared in 1871 in the nonsense poem 'Jabberwocky', which also gave English 'galumphing'.

Which word for noisy chaos did John Milton coin as the name of Satan's capital in Paradise Lost?

Pandemonium joins the Greek 'pan', all, to a Latin word for an evil spirit: the place of all demons. In the 1667 poem it is a palace built in the middle of Hell.

Which word for a lout comes from a race of brutish humans in the 1726 satire Gulliver's Travels?

Yahoo has meant 'a brute in human form' ever since the book appeared. Gulliver finds the calm, rational company of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms, far preferable.

Which evolutionary biologist coined the word 'meme' in 1976, shortening a Greek root so it would sound like 'gene'?

Richard Dawkins introduced the term in The Selfish Gene for an idea or behaviour that spreads from person to person. He trimmed the Greek-based 'mimeme' to a single syllable.

Which day of the week is named after a Germanic war god the Romans equated with Mars?

Tuesday is Tiw's day, a translation of the Latin 'dies Martis', day of Mars, which French keeps as 'mardi'. In Norse myth the same god, Tyr, loses his right hand to the wolf Fenrir.

Which breakfast-table word comes from the name of an Italic goddess of agriculture and grain crops?

Cereal comes from Ceres, whose name grows out of a root meaning 'to grow'. The same ancient root is thought to lie behind 'create', 'crescent' and 'croissant'.

Dandelion is a contraction of an Old French phrase naming which part of a lion?

Its tooth: dandelion shrinks 'dent de lion', lion's tooth, a translation of the medieval Latin 'dens leonis'. The teeth are the plant's jagged leaves, not its petals.

Which animal's name comes from Old French words that literally mean 'spine hog'?

Porcupine began as 'porc-espin' and took many forms in early English, including 'porkenpick' and Shakespeare's 'porpentine' in Hamlet.

Which word for a place of learning traces back to a Greek word whose basic sense was 'leisure'?

School goes back to the Greek 'skholē', spare time. In Athens the proper use of free time was discussion, so the term passed to the talk itself and then to the place for it.

The 'Y' in mock-antique signs like 'Ye Olde Shoppe' stands in for which lost English letter, pronounced 'th'?

Thorn, written Þ, had no piece of type in early printing, so printers substituted the visually similar y. The 'ye' that meant 'the' was always said 'the', however it was written.

The earliest known 'OMG' comes in a 1917 letter from British admiral Lord Fisher to which future prime minister?

Winston Churchill received the letter in September 1917. The Oxford English Dictionary credits the admiral with the first known use of the abbreviation for 'Oh my God'.

The stun gun's name 'Taser' is a loose acronym honouring which boy inventor from a 1911 adventure novel?

Tom Swift was the childhood hero of Jack Cover, the NASA researcher who built the device. Its name plays on the title Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle.

'Gerrymander' blends Governor Elbridge Gerry's name with which animal, said to resemble an 1812 Massachusetts district?

Salamander was the comparison Federalist editors made after Gerry signed a bill creating a contorted district near Boston. The Boston Gazette first printed 'Gerry-mander' in March 1812.

Which newspaper printed Arthur Wynne's 'word-cross' in December 1913, the puzzle usually cited as the first crossword?

The New York World ran the puzzle by Wynne, a journalist born in Liverpool. An illustrator later reversed the puzzle's name to 'cross-word', and the new order stuck.

Which animated series introduced the made-up words 'embiggen' and 'cromulent' in an episode about a town founder?

The Simpsons used both in 'Lisa the Iconoclast', where Springfield's motto runs 'A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man'. Embiggen has since turned up in scientific papers.

A book of maps is called an atlas because which Flemish geographer used the Titan's name on his 1595 collection?

Mercator chose the name out of respect for Atlas, whom he considered the first great geographer. His title promised an account of the whole universe, not simply a set of maps.

Which term for the weak, unstressed vowel written as an upside-down e comes from a Hebrew word meaning 'emptiness'?

Schwa entered linguistics in 1895 from German, which had taken it from the Hebrew 'shewa'. Phonetic alphabets write the sound as ə, a rotated lowercase e.

Which constructed language, launched by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, is named after his pen name meaning 'one who hopes'?

Esperanto was first presented simply as 'the International Language' by one 'Doktoro Esperanto'. Early adopters liked the pen name so much that they gave it to the tongue itself.

Which word for a family line comes from Old French for 'foot of a crane', after a forked manuscript sign?

Pedigree began as 'pied de gru'. Scribes showed descent with a forked sign like the branching lines of a family tree, which also happened to look like a bird's footprint.

Which flower's name did 11-year-old Frank Neuhauser spell to win the first US National Spelling Bee in 1925?

Gladiolus earned the boy a parade in his home town of Louisville, where he was presented with bouquets of gladioli. He had beaten eight other finalists.

W. C. Minor, a leading contributor of quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary, sent them from which English asylum?

Broadmoor held the former army surgeon from 1872 to 1910, after he shot a man in London while suffering delusions. He mined his large library of antiquarian books for examples.

Which word for the earthy smell of rain on dry ground did two researchers coin in a 1964 Nature paper?

Petrichor joins the Greek for stone to 'ichor', the golden fluid in the veins of the gods. Isabel Bear and R. G. Thomas used it for an odour released when dry rock or soil gets wet.

Which verb honours an English editor who published a cleaned-up 'family' Shakespeare in 1818?

Bowdlerize dates from 1836. Thomas Bowdler's edition promised to leave out whatever 'cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family'.

Which word for a hoisting tower comes from the surname of a hangman at London's Tyburn gallows around 1600?

Derrick first meant a hangman and then the gallows itself. Only in 1727 is it recorded for an apparatus that lifts and moves heavy weights.

Oxford's 2013 Word of the Year, 'selfie', is first recorded in a 2002 post on an internet forum in which country?

Australia had the term in general use before it spread abroad. Its first known appearance is on a science forum run by broadcaster Karl Kruszelnicki, in a post by Nathan Hope.

Which Hebrew word did the Gileadites use in the Book of Judges to unmask fleeing Ephraimites who could not pronounce it?

Shibboleth could mean 'stream' or 'ear of grain', but its value was as a password, because Ephraimites could not make the 'sh' sound. It now names any habit of speech or custom that marks out a group.

Which drug name began as a Bayer trademark, sold from 1898 as a non-addictive cough remedy?

Heroin is reputedly based on the German 'heroisch', heroic or strong. Bayer lost some of its rights to the trademark under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.

Which knitted garment is named after the British general who led the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War?

Cardigan was the title of James Brudenell, the general who set the style. In one account he supposedly wore such a jacket while leading the charge in 1854.