Up next in 10
Etymology is not an exact science, but the stories behind word origins and etymologies can still teach us a lot about linguistics. In this episode of The List Show, Erin breaks down the interesting etymology of 70 words, from vaccine to science.
You'll learn the etymology of vaccine and much more.
In case you forgot, The List Show is a trivia-tastic, fact-filled show for curious people. Subscribe here for new Mental Floss episodes every Wednesday: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpZ5qUqpW4hW4zdfuBxMSJA?sub_confirmation=1
Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss?sub_confirmation=1
About Mental Floss:
Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more.
Website: http://www.mentalfloss.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mental_floss
Facebook: https://facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine
Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided.
2025 Mental Floss
The Interesting Etymology Behind 70 Words | Mental Floss
Show More Show Less View Video Transcript
0:00
Do you know that the word vaccine comes to us from cows
0:02
I don't mean an inventive Holstein with a typewriter, although I would absolutely watch that hour-long drama
0:08
Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of mentalfloss.com, and this is The List Show
0:12
The word vaccine derives indirectly from the Latin for cow, waka. The story goes that at the turn of the 19th century
0:18
a British doctor named Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox
0:22
or variola vaccini were much less likely to contract smallpox, which could otherwise
0:27
devastate entire communities. Jenner decided to introduce the pus from a woman's cowpox lesion into a cut he made on
0:33
an 8-year-old boy's arm. Luckily for Dr. Jenner, the boy—and the human race at large—the cowpox pus provided
0:39
a strong degree of smallpox protection, and the concept of a vaccine was born
0:43
Note the similarity between the word for vaccine and the word for cow in a number of romance
0:47
languages today. Two centuries and change later, vaccines have eradicated smallpox from the planet, and we
0:52
continue to take inspiration from Jenner's coinage when discussing vaccines—even ones that don't come from cowpox pus. And vaccine is just the first of many words whose interesting
1:01
etymologies I'll be discussing today
1:12
The word clue is a variant of clue, meaning ball of thread or yarn, according to Merriam-Webster
1:17
It comes to us from Middle and Old English, and it isn't a reference to a kitten detective—also
1:22
a show I would watch. The ball of yarn in question is a handy method for finding your way out of a labyrinth. As
1:27
as Greek mythology's Theseus did after killing the Minotaur. Before I go on, let me just say, etymologies can be hard to establish beyond a doubt
1:35
Academic disagreements often exist, and misinformation is rampant. In the case of vaccine, for example, later genetic testing revealed that those first vaccines
1:42
may have actually been using a virus closely related to horsepox, not cowpox
1:46
Maybe we should be referring to equination campaigns today, but when it comes to the
1:50
sprawling way that language develops, it can be hard to get the horse-slash-cow back in
1:53
the barn. I'm not necessarily going to try to trace every word back to its ultimate origin point. Instead
2:00
I'll try to share at least one cool way station each word made on its journey to the present day
2:04
With that caveat out of the way, and for no particular reason, let's talk about the etymology
2:08
of the phrase cop-out. Louis Joseph Vance's 1910 novel The Fortune Hunter includes the following
2:13
line, he simply can't lose, can't fail to cop out the best-looking girl with the biggest bankroll
2:17
in town. In that context, cop means something like get or grab, a usage that survives today
2:23
in a phrase like cop-a-fiel, and which may have roots in the Latin cop-ere, to take, or the Old
2:28
Frisian cop-ia, to buy. Old Frisian, by the way, is a West Germanic language that some linguists
2:33
consider a close relative of Old English. Anyway, eventually one of the main things people were
2:38
cop-ing was out of further trouble by entering into something like a plea deal after being caught
2:43
committing a crime. Today, a cop-out can mean any type of excuse or evasion to avoid trouble or
2:48
responsibility. If you've ever gotten the tingles while getting your hair washed at a salon
2:52
the origin of the word shampoo will make sense to you. It comes from a conjugation of the Hindi
2:57
verb compna, or shampna, meaning to press or need muscles. A 1762 account from an officer of the
3:03
East India Company abroad describes the process of being shampooed, which was a vigorous full-body
3:08
massage done alongside hair washing. The word, if not the full custom, was exported to England
3:12
where its hair-specific meaning coalesced. And by the way, please don't close your eyes and
3:16
coo while your hairdresser massages your scalp. Nobody wants that. The term nightlife doesn't
3:21
require a ton of explanation. It's life that happens at night. But it is kind of neat to realize
3:26
that the word's first known appearance in English was in Herman Melville's Pierre or The Ambiguities
3:32
Melville describes his character, Pierre, looking for a cab late at night. He turns off a side street
3:36
and finds himself suddenly precipitated into the not-yet-repressed noise and contention, and all the garish nightlife of a vast thoroughfare. The subject of words coined by authors can often
3:46
be a tricky one, since there's a difference between a writer inventing a word and just being
3:51
to have been recorded using it. Here, though, are some words we can reasonably believe were
3:55
created by notable scribes. Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky has a character chortle in joy
4:01
It seems Carroll combined chuckling and snorting to build a new, intuitively understood verb
4:06
John Milton constructed the word pandemonium out of the Greek root pan, or all, and daimonium
4:11
from the Latin for evil spirit. The pandemonium in Paradise Lost was a place for all the demons
4:17
which makes sense as a name for what was basically the capital city of hell. It was the opposite of a pantheon, or a place for all the gods
4:23
Pandemonium was used in something more like its modern context in the Cheltenham Chronicle
4:27
in 1819, when a writer invited his audience, let any man and his senses take a view of the riot, the confusion, the fury, the pandemonium
4:35
of hatred, discord, and all bad feeling. Let loose in the late contest for Westminster
4:40
A writer is also responsible for the word robot, but in this case, the word was coined
4:44
not in an epic poem, but in a play. In Karel Čapik's 1920 hit R.U.R., or Rossum's Universal Robots, in translation
4:52
Čapik needed a word for the mechanical beings who go on to world domination in his story
4:56
After originally toying with the idea of using the Latin labori, or labor
5:00
as a departure point for labeling his soulless workers, Čapik's brother pointed him to the word
5:04
robota, a term that, in Czech, is used in regards to serfdom. And it's actually in regards to the
5:09
Central European system of serfdom that English had picked up the word robot decades earlier
5:14
That explains this wonderful line from a discourse about politics in 1855, long before the word was applied to mechanical beings
5:20
The Austrian government has suppressed the robot. This next author coined word is a mental floss favorite, or the bane of our existence, depending on the mood you catch us in
5:30
Today, factoid is often used to mean a short, somewhat trivial fact, the kind of thing a website devoted to curiosity and fun facts often shares
5:38
When Norman Mailer coined the term, though, he explained it as, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper
5:45
Not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the silent majority
5:49
If you're interested in just the facts, you may want to know that the word fact comes to us from
5:53
a verb meaning to do. The past participle of the Latin verb facere is factus, meaning done
5:58
As a noun, that becomes factum, or an event occurrence deed achievement. The modern meaning
6:04
of fact, something known to be true, implicitly contrasts things that are only claimed to have
6:09
happened with something that has actually occurred. This next word has a pretty well-known
6:13
etymology, but it's too good to omit from this list. Whiskey, the cause of and solution to at
6:19
least some of life's problems, comes from the Gaelic ishkabaha, or water of life. When ships
6:24
arrived in Venice during the 14th century, they were sometimes required to spend 40 days in port
6:28
to suss out any possible cases of plague. In Italian, 40 days is quaranta giorni, requiring
6:34
just a short linguistic hop to the English quarantine. Italians may have been on the
6:38
right track with quarantine, but they sort of missed the mark with malaria. The term
6:42
can literally be translated as bad air, reflecting the one-time belief that the disease was caused
6:46
by dangerous fumes from swamps Though to be fair air that beset by parasite mosquitoes definitely qualifies as bad air of some kind Mortgage comes from the Old French mortgage the roots of which in literal translation mean something like dead pledge But despite what you might have read online that probably
7:03
not because you'll be paying off your mortgage the rest of your life. Sir Edward Koch may
7:06
have gotten closer to the mark in his Institutes of the Laws of England back in 1628. Koch
7:11
understands a mortgage as a sort of standoff, destined to end either when the borrower fails
7:15
to pay, thus rendering the property dead to him, or when payment is delivered in full
7:19
in which case the agreement is dead to the lender. You might read that checkmate comes from the Arabic
7:24
al-shamata, meaning the king died, but if you play chess, you recognize that this doesn't totally
7:29
track. I guess it's subjective how we're supposed to interpret the personal narratives of the
7:33
inanimate pieces of a chessboard, but the king doesn't exactly die at the end of a game of chess
7:38
does he? A more plausible explanation for the word was offered back in 1938 by M. E. Mogadam
7:43
in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. Mogadam explained that the Persian shamat
7:48
meaning something like, the king is left, without a way to escape, seems a better reflection of both
7:53
chess gameplay and the historical tradition of capturing a warring monarch, rather than killing
7:57
him as soon as possible. Of course, I'm sure some sinister warriors throughout history killed a king
8:02
at first glance. Rules of war be damned. But were those warriors left-handed? That apparent non-sequitur
8:07
is actually a nod to sinister's etymology. It comes from a Latin word that means on the left side
8:13
a remnant of an outdated association between left-handed people and wickedness or other
8:17
unsavory traits. That somewhat confusing anti-lefty bias may have roots in pure percentages
8:22
Most of the population was, then as now, right-handed. Christianity might also have played
8:27
a role. The book of Matthew says that Jesus will divide the nations like a shepherd divides his
8:32
sheep from his goats, with the presumably pious sheep sent to the kingdom of heaven on the right
8:36
and the cursed goats, along with everything they own, going in a box to the left
8:40
It may have conflated some text there, but you get the point. The righty-lefty divide shows up
8:45
other etymologies. Dexterity, or a skillfulness with one's hands, comes from the Latin dexter
8:50
meaning a promising premium cable show that totally jumped the shark but then got a reboot
8:54
anyway. Sorry, that's actually on the right side. The right-handed bias was so strong that when Sir
9:00
Thomas Brown coined the term ambidextrous, meaning a person who can use their left and right hands
9:04
equally well, he used the same Latin dexter with the prefix ambi, meaning both, basically describing
9:10
someone as right-handed on both sides. We know roughly when and where the word assassin originally
9:16
comes from, but there's some disagreement on the why. Hassani Sabah lived from around 1050 to 1124
9:23
He called his secret religious order of Nazari followers Asasiuna, or the faithful. And these
9:28
followers did carry out what we would today call assassinations, targeted killings for political or
9:33
religious reasons. But many sources, including Marco Polo, suggest that the word assassin had
9:37
something to do with the word hashishin, or hash eaters. Yeah, the same stuff you can buy in a Dutch
9:42
coffee shop. Marco spun a yarn about devotees being drugged with some kind of hash-infused liquid and
9:47
then convinced to carry out killings. It doesn't seem the most plausible explanation, but even in
9:52
modern times, there doesn't seem to be unanimous acceptance of any one origin story. The periodic
9:57
table of the elements contains a hint about the origins of the word plumber. That pb comes from
10:02
the Latin for lead, plumbum, which also eventually gave us the word plumber. It originally referred
10:06
to someone working with lead in a number of contexts, without its modern focus on the pipes
10:10
that move water in and out of buildings. But since pipes were long made of lead, plumbers
10:14
eventually became known as the people to call when your sink or toilet needs professional
10:18
expertise. Let's hit some more professional etymologies. There are still plenty of butchers
10:22
around the world who will sell you goat meat, but in the United States and other English-speaking countries, you might also expect to find beef, chicken, or pork. The word butcher does seem
10:30
to trace its origins through words like the Old French bouchier, though, literally meaning
10:35
slaughterer of goats. It seems an easy enough transition from there to any person who prepares
10:40
and sells meat, goat or otherwise. A midwife isn't halfway towards becoming your wife when
10:44
she assists in your spouse's childbirth. The word instead combines the prefix mid
10:49
which probably comes from the Middle English for together with, and an older use of the word wife
10:54
referring not just to a female spouse but to any woman. A midwife is indeed with a woman when
10:58
carrying out her job, even if that doesn't tell the full story of what she, or in modern times
11:03
sometimes he, is doing to help. A similarly passive role is suggested by the etymology for
11:08
obstetric, which comes from the Latin obstetriks, basically a midwife. The Latin obstare means to
11:14
stand in front of, as in standing in front of the birthing baby, which I suppose does accurately
11:19
capture one facet of a midwife's responsibilities. Today, obstetric is an adjective describing any
11:24
number of things relating to childbirth. The approval rating of pundits as a profession
11:28
is probably on par with telemarketers and tummy tea peddlers. The word's origin, though
11:34
points to the rarefied error professional opinion givers are meant to occupy. Pandit comes to us from a Sanskrit word that has been transliterated as pundit
11:41
pandit, or pandita. It originally referred to someone who had committed to memory a significant
11:46
amount of the Hindu religious text known as the Vedas. It came to refer more generally to something
11:50
like a learned man or philosopher by the 19th century, and today that meaning has expanded to
11:56
include people who like to yell at one another on cable news. The word astronaut actually predates
12:01
the real-life profession. It was used to refer to a spaceship, not a person, in Percy Gregg's
12:06
Across the Zodiac back in 1880. When referring to a person who explores space, a similar word in
12:11
French, astronautique, was coined by science fiction writer Joseph-Henri Honoré Beau in 1927
12:17
The word's Greek roots give it the literal, if still quite poetic, meaning of something like
12:21
star sailor. You might think juggernaut has a similar Greek root, but it actually derives from
12:26
Hindi. Jagat, for world, plus nata, for lord or protector, gave us Jagunath, roughly lord of the
12:32
world, a Hindi deity. One story for how that specific usage led to our current understanding
12:37
of the word involves the annual chariot festival that took place at the Jagunath temple in Puri
12:42
India. Reports of pilgrims being crushed under the procession of chariots may have given rise
12:46
to Jagunath's meaning as a massive inexorable force, though those reports may have been the
12:51
product of a biased perspective from Western sources, rather than an accurate accounting
12:56
of events. Tycoon isn't exactly a profession, unless you're referring to Dino Park Tycoon, which
13:01
was absolutely my childhood vocation. But the word has its own interesting etymology
13:06
It comes to the United States via the Japanese tycoon, a word whose Chinese roots mean great ruler
13:12
When Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Japan in the 1850s, he wanted to meet with a dignitary
13:16
of the highest rank in the empire. Everybody seemed to think that meant the emperor, but in fact the shogun wielded more power
13:21
in Japan at the time. Japanese officials used the title tycoon to reflect the primacy of the shogun's power
13:27
The word caught on stateside and began to expand in meaning, with usages like the one
13:31
found in the New Orleans Daily Crescent on May 28, 1860. Critiquing then-Senator William Henry Seward's approach to anti-slavery efforts, the paper
13:38
claimed he appropriated to himself the position of master and tycoon of the black Republicans
13:44
The word even found fans amongst Abraham Lincoln aides during his presidency They took to calling him the tycoon in letters and diary entries Around the same time as Honest Abe Honest Aides were writing about the tycoon an African elephant
13:56
was being exhibited at France's Jardin des Plantes that would eventually become known as Jumbo
14:01
And though Jumbo's tumultuous life as a celebrity pachyderm may well have popularized the word
14:05
jumbo to mean anything very large, it's not necessarily where the word originally comes from
14:10
It was used to describe someone or something clumsy as early as 1823, and its use of slang
14:15
likely predates that written record. In the United States, at least, few people want to be
14:19
called a Nimrod. But once upon a time, it meant you were a hunter, in the vein of the Old Testament's
14:24
Nimrod. Even today, Nimrod is a fairly common name in Israel. How it came to be a synonym for
14:30
doofus in English is unclear. It could be through irony. You know, you're talking about your foolish
14:35
hunting buddy Mike. Yeah, he's a real Nimrod. Or perhaps because the biblical figure Nimrod is
14:40
sometimes, though not in Genesis, said to be associated with the ill-fated attempt to build
14:45
The Tower of Babel. Whatever the origin, it's often stated that Bugs Bunny helped popularize
14:49
the derogatory meaning of the word when he lobbed it at everyone's favorite hapless hunter, Elmer Fudd. But no one ever actually mentions which tune that was in. During our long and
14:57
exhaustive research, which required much popcorn, we found that Daffy actually calls Elmer Nimrod
15:03
in 1948's What Makes Daffy Duck. Bugs used it in a reference to Yosemite Sam three years later
15:08
in Rabbit Every Monday. That being said, there are a lot of cartoons, so if you have any that
15:12
should watch to solve this mystery? Leave him in the comments. Buggs wasn't talking shades of red
15:17
when he accused Elmer of being a maroon, and he wasn't calling him a chestnut either. That is where
15:21
we get the word maroon from, though, from the French coulure maronne, referring to a maronne
15:25
or chestnut. Many other colors take their names from objects in the world. Crimson, for example
15:30
can possibly be traced to the Proto-Indo-European crimus, or worm, reflecting the fact that the color
15:36
was once produced by crushing a specific type of worm. Chartreuse owes its existence as a color to
15:41
to a liqueur of the same name, which was once made by Carthusian monks. And orange comes from
15:46
well, oranges. Its predecessors include the Middle French orange and the Sanskrit narangas
15:52
But what's really interesting to note is that English didn't really have a word for this color
15:55
for centuries. Geoffrey Chaucer, describing a fox in Nun's Priest's Tale, went with the phrase
16:01
betwixt yellow and reed. Yellow reed, or yellow red, was a somewhat clumsy Old English construction
16:07
that basically served the linguistic function of today's orange for almost a millennium
16:11
as David Scott Kasten and Stephen Farthing point out in an essay on Lit Hub
16:15
Only once the fruit became widely available in Europe did the color start to infiltrate the
16:19
continent's languages. Dolphins are mammals, so it makes sense that the word dolphin comes from
16:23
the ancient Greek delphys, or womb. But it's not 100% certain that the name dolphin came about
16:29
because it seemed like a fish with a womb. Some believe that dolphins are actually shaped like a
16:33
human womb, and other explanations suggest that the womb in question refers to a special bond
16:38
between humans and dolphins, who did seem especially esteemed in ancient Greek culture
16:42
I'm going with fish with a womb, but what do I know? Porpoise, by the way, basically means pigfish
16:48
Orangutan, on the other hand, goes back to the Malay orangutan, meaning man of the woods. This
16:53
would have been a more provocative title for Justin Timberlake's last album. There are a number of
16:58
words that derive from specific individuals. A dunce was once a descriptor for an acolyte of the
17:03
Scottish theologian John Duns Scotus. As Duns' ideas fell out of favor, the word came to its
17:08
present-day pejorative meaning, as Merriam-Webster describes it, a slow-witted or stupid person
17:14
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing political districts in an attempt to benefit
17:17
a certain political party or constituency. The word comes to us from Governor Elbridge Gerry
17:22
and a salamander. Or, more accurately, from the misshapen district that appeared in Massachusetts
17:27
while Gerry was governor, which some claimed looked like a salamander. One origin story for
17:31
the word says that the poet Richard Alsop coined it at a dinner party in 1812. That's hard to
17:36
confirm, but there is a record of Alsop's sometime collaborator Elkanah Tisdale drawing
17:40
The Gerrymander as a satirical comic in an 1812 issue of the Boston Gazette
17:45
You can boycott a company whose principles you disagree with by refusing to offer them your
17:49
business, but the original boycott may have been a bit more like a boycott-strike hybrid
17:54
Retired British Army officer Captain Charles Boycott was managing the property of an absentee
17:58
landlord in late 19th century Ireland. A rent dispute between boycott and the farmers tending
18:03
the land led the tenants to stop working the fields and to shun the Englishmen en masse
18:07
Local businesses followed suit and boycott, rich in status but poor in access to useful
18:12
resources like food, was driven out of town. The saxophone takes its name from its inventor
18:16
Adolph Sax. Nicotine, the addictive poison in tobacco, owes its name to the French diplomat
18:20
who brought tobacco plants to France, Jean Nico. It's generally agreed that the word silhouette
18:25
comes from the French author and politician, Etienne de Silhouette, but how that man lent
18:30
his name to a particular style of image is a bit hard to say. On his website Word Histories
18:34
the French teacher and linguistics enthusiast Pascal Trejour lays out a number of theories
18:39
and finds himself most convinced by the version offered by an 1869 edition of the
18:44
Journal Officiel de l'Empare Francais, that Etienne de Silhouette himself pioneered the
18:48
technique of drawing portraits in the silhouette style. This account claims that de Silhouette
18:53
covered rooms of his castle with silhouette drawings, but as the castle was destroyed by
18:57
a fire in 1871, it is unfortunately unverifiable today. German inventor Rudolf Diesel invented the
19:03
diesel engine, Israeli major Uziel Gall designed the Uzi submachine gun, and Frenchman Louis Braille
19:09
developed the original Braille system for reading and writing, inspired by his own needs as a blind
19:13
man. We've mentioned a number of Greek roots already, so it should come as no surprise that
19:17
a number of English words are related to Greek and Roman mythology. It's worth pointing out
19:21
though that it can be difficult to know whether the mythological figures predate the words
19:25
themselves or if the myths are merely attempts to personify the words. So while these might not all
19:30
be etymologies in the strictest definition of the word, I think we can fairly say that the myths
19:35
played a pivotal role in popularizing and spreading the various words they're connected to
19:39
Plus, they're just plain fun stories, even if it is hard to track the chronology. Chronology
19:44
incidentally, comes to us from the Greek chronos, or time. Chronus, who is not necessarily synonymous
19:50
with the leader of the Titans, Cronus, was the Greek personification of time. We all know what
19:55
an echo is. The story of the nymph Echo points to that meaning. According to Ovid's Metamorphosis
20:03
Jupiter's wife Juno condemned Echo to only speak the last words spoken to her. Echo was scorned by
20:08
the hunter Narcissus, who famously fell in love with his own reflection. This story provided
20:12
inspiration to German psychiatrist Paul Nacka to coin the term that would, in English, become
20:17
narcissism. NACA used the word to describe a person who treated their own body as if it were
20:22
a sexual object in lieu of having sexual desires for other people, in the words of psychologytoday.com
20:28
In the ensuing years, the meaning of the word expanded through its use by figures like Sigmund
20:31
Freud. Today, it can be used in reference to anyone with excessive egoism or a tendency to
20:36
megalomania. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes it's a cicada, at least according to
20:42
of the more popular theories about cigar etymology The Spanish word for cigar cigarro is a lot like the Spanish word for cicada cigarra This has led some to speculate that cigars were
20:53
named for their rough resemblance to the cylindrical bug. A more plausible explanation
20:57
to my mind at least, is that cigar comes from the Mayan word cicar, meaning to smoke
21:01
If you call your cigar a stogie, you have the township of Conestoga, Pennsylvania to thank
21:05
Some say that's because an early cigar factory was built in the area, but more sources seem to
21:09
think it has to do with the smoking habits of the men who drove so-called Conestoga wagons
21:14
The Oxford English Dictionary says that the Greek ancestor of the word oregano, areganos, is probably a lone word, as the plan itself comes from Africa. But Greek speakers came
21:22
up with a pretty convincing folk etymology for the word based on its sounds. Are means mountain
21:26
in Greek, and ganos means brightness or joy, giving the word a perhaps apocryphal but still
21:32
evocative meaning as something like joy of the mountain. The word tulip comes to us through a
21:36
Latinized version of the Turkish word for turban, tulband, according to the Amsterdam
21:40
Tulip Museum, presumably because the shape of the flower resembles some versions of the
21:44
headwear. Daisy comes from the Old English phrase diazage, or day's eye, a nod to the
21:49
flower's habit of closing up at dusk and opening at dawn. Orchids may be beautiful, but their etymology isn't quite so poetic. The word comes from
21:57
the Greek orkies, for testicle, thought to reflect the shape of the plant's underground
22:01
storage organs. In Middle English, in fact, the plant was known as the bollock wart
22:06
What's the origin of the universe? Linguistically speaking, that is. In John D. Barrow's Book of
22:10
Universes, he traces the word to the Latin unuwersum, composed of the roots unus, or one
22:16
and wersus, a conjugation of a verb meaning to turn, rotate, roll, or change. That gives us a
22:22
literal meaning of something like rolled into one. That could just reflect that the universe is
22:27
you know, everything kind of rolled up into one all-encompassing thing, or a specific cosmological
22:32
belief from antiquity, when it was thought that the outer crystalline sphere of the heavens
22:36
rotated and thereby communicated change and movement to the planetary spheres inside it
22:41
Sometime between the Big Bang and today, someone got the bright idea to start a school. It might surprise teenagers to know that the words antecedent, the Greek skoli
22:48
actually meant something like leisure of spare time. In ancient Athens and Rome
22:52
a favorite use of spare time was to engage in learned discussion, at least amongst a certain subset of the population. If you trade sandwiches with
22:59
your classmate at lunchtime, you can call them your companion. The word comes from the Latin
23:04
comb, or together with, and panis, for bread or food. That makes the word's original meaning
23:09
something like one who you break bread with. Window comes from the Old Norse vindega, or
23:14
windi. It originally referred to a hole in the roof, but over the years made the jump
23:19
down to glazed glass usually found on a wall. While we're talking architectural origins
23:23
I'll point out that eavesdrop comes, a bit indirectly, from the Old English eavesdrop
23:27
the place around a house where the rainwater drips off the roof, according to the online
23:31
etymology dictionary, an eavesdropper thus became someone who stands at walls or windows
23:36
to overhear what's going on, which may have been backformed into the verb eavesdrop
23:40
A gossip was originally a god sib in Old English, and it was basically a godparent, someone
23:45
who acted as a sponsor at a baptism. By the 14th century, the word could encompass any
23:49
familiar acquaintance, especially women who were invited to a friend's birth. Through
23:54
a long line of loose talkers or perhaps some old-fashioned sexism, the word evolved to mean
23:58
anyone engaged in idle talk. And eventually, gossip took on its modern meaning as baseless
24:03
rumor or trifling talk. Sixty words in, and we finally have an etymology Rebecca Black can get
24:08
behind. Friday was, in Old English, frigidaga, named for a Germanic goddess of love. An amateur
24:14
does something not for pay, but simply because they love it. It makes sense, then, that its Latin
24:19
root is amare, to love. Flower comes from the French fleur, and so does flower
24:24
The part of a plant used to make flour, the kind that you mill, was considered the flower
24:29
of the grain, the best part. Anthology has its own floral origin
24:33
The Greek anthos, or flower, and loia, meaning collection, gave us antholaia, literally something
24:39
like a collection of flowers, but with an early meaning describing a collection of poems
24:43
Today, an anthology can be made up of a number of things, poems, essays, songs
24:49
but if you were describing a collection of flowers, you'd probably use the word bouquet. That word was probably introduced to English by Lady Mary Montague
24:55
from the French word of the same spelling. Montague, by the way, also familiarized English readers with the language of flowers
25:01
based on her experiences abroad. The idea that a lily symbolizes purity, for example
25:06
Bouquet can be traced back to the medieval Latin boscus, or grove, as in a group of trees
25:11
The word bouquet originally meant something like little wood. Canaries are, strangely enough, named after dogs
25:17
Kind of. They're actually named after the Canary Islands, where they were found
25:21
The islands, in turn, take their name from the Latin for dog, conus, though it's not
25:25
entirely clear why. Some accounts say this is because people who visited the islands found them populated with
25:30
dogs, and perhaps even residents who venerated their four-legged friends. Others believe the dogs in question were actually monk seals, which are sometimes called sea dogs
25:39
Walruses have their own interesting etymology, though it, too, is a bit hard to pin down definitively
25:43
In fact, a one-time employee of the Oxford English Dictionary hand-wrote a number of
25:47
versions of the word's origins, six of which survive in the archives. That OED employee was
25:52
one J.R.R. Tolkien, and his favorite explanation went back through Dutch to the old Norse word
25:57
ramsholvar. Tolkien went on to coin or redefine a number of words in building out his fantasy worlds
26:03
but one of his most famous creations may not have been entirely his. The author himself said he
26:08
coined the word hobbit in a moment of inspiration, and his son Michael recalled hearing his father
26:12
use the word in stories he invented for his children. Later in life, though, Tolkien expressed
26:16
a degree of doubt. After all, it would have been easy to have once seen or heard the word and then
26:21
unconsciously incorporate it into his own personal vocabulary. Pre-Tolkien uses of Hobbit were
26:25
eventually discovered, including in the Denim Tracks, a compendium of British folklore collected
26:30
in the mid-1800s, in which they were listed as a type of supernatural creature. Whether this was
26:35
a case of parallel thinking or unintended influence may be impossible to say, but
26:39
befitting a philologist such as Tolkien, the author eventually created his own retroactive
26:44
etymology for hobbit, deciding that it derived from holbitla, from Old English roots meaning hole-dweller
26:51
Word number 69, nice. No, I mean the word nice. But if you laughed at that stupid joke, you may be as nice as I am, in the original meaning
26:59
of the word. Nice once meant foolish, from the old French nice or ignorant, from the Latin nescue
27:05
Over the centuries, nice went through a dizzying array of meanings, with stops at timid or
27:09
fainthearted, fussy or fastidious, and dainty or delicate, before arriving at pleasant or
27:14
agreeable by the 19th century. I mentioned the Latin nescius. That word itself comes from the
27:19
prefix ne, for not, and a form of the Latin verb skire, to know. That verb also eventually gave us
27:25
science, which even today isn't far from its mid-14th century meaning, according to the online
27:29
etymology dictionary, what is known, knowledge of something acquired by study, information
27:34
I hope your knowledge of etymology is a little bit broader than it was when you started this video
27:38
If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing and hitting the little bell. We'll see you next time
#education