As most histories of Halloween will tell you, Hallowe'en (or Halloween) is a shortened version of All-Hallow(s)-Eve, but how and why did eve turn into e'en? For that matter, what is a hallow? Why did the all get dropped?  Continue reading...

To be called a nerd these days isn't such a bad thing -- it can even be a statement of pride, a way of owning up to an all-consuming passionate interest, particularly in something technological or pop-cultural (or both). It has been reclaimed as a positive label in much the same way as geek has. The cartoonish '80s movie The Revenge of the Nerds turned out to have some prescience, as nerdy types from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg have come to rule so much of 21st-century life. So it's only natural to wonder, where did the word nerd come from?  Continue reading...

On the 4th of July, there's no better time to dig into the origins of the term "hot dog." Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer recently took a look at the earliest known evidence for "hot dog" from Paterson, New Jersey. You can read his Word Routes column on the subject here, and you can hear him talking about the latest research today on NPR's Morning Edition.

This is the story of two business names — both US trademarks, one for half a century and one for less than a year. Actually, it's the story of the word that's common to both trademarks. And to get directly to my point, it's about the way that one word has shifted in meaning over recent history — but only incompletely, so that both meanings coexist a little uncomfortably in semantic space, at least for me and many other speakers of American English.  Continue reading...

On his site Wordorigins.org, David Wilton has started a series of posts on "words first used in English for a particular year," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In his first post, he begins with the year 1911. Did you know that air force, floozy, lettergram, mozzarella, and taxi were all first documented a century ago? Read Wilton's post here.

Yesterday, President Obama gave his much-anticipated "Arab spring" speech, setting out his foreign policy objectives in the Middle East in the wake of the revolutionary wave that has shook countries from Tunisia to Bahrain. But how did we come to call this moment in history the "Arab spring," considering that the Tunisian protests that got the ball rolling started way back in December?  Continue reading...