Word of the Week

So, my husband made what I deem an incredible etymology discovery this weekend. That isle and island are completely unrelated words, from different roots. Color me baffled. The world island was originally spelled yland, and appeared in 1590...to replace the Old...

My kids made me look this one up the other day, wondering if pig and pigment were related...giving that Xoe's been studying base words and prefixes and suffixes, this is a logical question. =) So away to www.etymonline.com I went. To discover that, as I suspected, no....

Don't you hate it when plans backfire? Ever stop to wonder how long they've been doing it--with that exact word, anyway? No? Well, pause to wonder. 😉 One of the first meanings of backfire to find its way into English was a literal fire--one lit on a prairie to stop...

With all the World Cup stuff going on right now, this one seemed appropriate. And is why my kids asked, "Why do we call it soccer and everyone else call it football?" So naturally, I looked it up. =) As it turns out, soccer comes directly from football...sort of. It...

In the closing scene of The Lost Heiress, my hero is observing that someone has become a bit of a celebrity...so naturally, I had to look it up to make sure that it was in use like that in 1911. I discovered that celebrity comes directly from the Old French and Latin...

While we were in the doctor's office on Friday, we were musing about the biohazard symbol...and wondering what it meant and how it came to be chosen. So thanks to the wonders of smart phones, my hubby looked it up. 😉 I'm just going to quote directly from the source...

A place at which I love to hang out...Seascape by William Trost Richards, 1901 I looked this word up the other day to make sure "get the hang of it" would be an appropriate phrase to use in a book set in 1911--and discovered that there are a plethora of hang uses with...

The honking of a family of geese wandering down to a nearby pond at 5:30 this morning was inspiring, what can I say? 😉 Goose, meaning the water fowl, is not surprisingly old--really old, as old as English. Interestingly, the word's roots were not only for a goose,...

Okay, so no, I wasn't just looking up shoulder. 😉 But in looking up the origins of the phrase cold shoulder for my recently-finished Edwardian, I found several of the uses interesting, so I thought I'd share. Shoulder itself has been in English approximately...

Short but sweet one today. =) I grew up with a perfectionist for a father, so it's a word I've known for, oh, ever. I too can be a perfectionist in a lot of things (housekeeping not among them, ha ha). Never had I thought to look up its etymology, though, until I came...

I've watched a lot of historical shows and movies (shocker, right?). And I've also studied enough historical dialect that I can tell when they get something wrong (well, a lot of the time). And in so, so many, I've heard one character demand of another, "Shut up!"...

Last night I ate an orange. (I know--groundbreaking news, right? LOL) At which point Xoe came in and exclaimed over how lovely my hands smelled. Which prompted her cheeky question of, "Mommy, did you get new cologne?" I, naturally, said, "Now, now. These days cologne...

It's always fun to trace these words that have become names kids call one another...and eventually a banner of pride, LOL. Photo by Tommy Hancher Geek traces its origins back to 1510, surprisingly--and was even used by Shakespeare! The meaning has changed over time,...

Image by Martin Olsson For some reason, I had this image of an hourglass being really, truly ancient. Like Ancient Egyptian kind of ancient. I'm not sure where that idea came from...probably some movie, LOL. Or maybe just the idea of the sands of time obviously being...

Now this is fantastic! C&E Dragon by David Revoy One thing I often flag when I'm editing and have to think about when I'm writing are those words that we use today in a rather un-amazing sense. Words that have come to mean an ambivalent "okay" or "nice." Words...

We have so many beautiful color names, that all describe beautiful shades--which surely existed forever, right? Maybe...but the words sure didn't! So today, a few quick lessons on when some of those shade names joined the English language. =) Indian Pigments (image by...

First of all, my apologies to anyone who missed my Thoughtful Thursday last week--I was taking a sick day. Just a cold, which I'm happy to say didn't get as bad for me as it did for my hubby. Not that I'm happy it involved a fever for the hubby--you know what I mean....

Patent diagram of the first escalator ("revolving stairs") - 1859 This one got me. I admit it. I looked it up during edits on a WhiteFire book because I wasn't sure it was quite early enough in the sense used. And what do I find? A surprise! Escalate is new. Darn new....

A Roman Calendar When I'm writing or editing historicals, much of my word nit-picking relies on gut and ear. If something feels too new or sounds too new (as in, I don't remember reading it in works of the period), I look it up. Which is how I came to look up date...

The Duchess of Chevreuse as Diana the Huntressby Claude Deruet, 17th century We see a lot of historical heroines described as feisty--and why not? It's a great word, right? It means "spirited," right? Wrong. Though I just learned this recently, and now I'm wondering...

The Blizzard by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1860 Given the awful winter weather striking so much of the country this year, this seemed like an appropriate word for the day. =) Though one I can't take credit for coming up with--one of my fellow Colonial Writers, the...

First of all, I did do the drawing last week for the winner of the digital of one of the Ellie Sweet books, and the lucky duck was Kirstin Whitener! Congrats, Kirstin! I know you'll love them!! This week I'll be starting a giveaway for a signed paperback of The...

Last night my poor little Rowyn had a toenail come off (ouch!), and his papa said that that surely deserved as much consideration as losing a tooth. So Rowyn got to pick dinner. Hence how the White family ended up eating waffles, macaroni and cheese, and grapes, LOL....

I called Xoe chum last week, and she gave me such a look! LOL--she only knew the word as "fish food," apparently. (Thanks, Spongebob. Really.) I had to tell her that it meant "friend" too. And then, of course, had to look it up to see where these two very-different...

This classifies as another word that I knew was new, but didn't know was that new. Jitters entered English round about 1925--and it's not entirely clear where it came from. The best guess is that it's a variation of chitter, which had been a dialectical word for...

Nearly forgot it was Monday! LOL But lucky for you, I remembered. 😉 And so, I'm hear to talk about acute. This will be a quick one, but I found it kinda interesting primarily because of my own weird thought-processes. See, when I was learning about angles back in...

Last week in the course of our homeschool day, somehow or another we got talking about what our different fingers are called, and my clever little Xoe asked me why the pointer finger is also called the index finger. Closeup from Michelangelo's Creation of Adam Insert...

I'm back! All settled in (mostly) at the new house, with internet up and running--if you heard the "Hallelujah Chorus" ringing through the air last night, that was just me when my angel of a husband got it all set up. 😉 My search for a word of the week started with...

One of my historical writer friends asked about canteens a little while ago (namely, what they would have called them before they were canteens), which inspired me to look up the word. Canteen is from the French cantine, which means "sutler's shop." Which I had to...

Leave it to Roseanna to browse through the dictionary for fun on the weekend. 😉 Sunday as I was beginning to think about the Word of the Week, I popped over to www.etymonline.com and accidentally bumped the O section. Then thought, "Sure, go with it" and browsed...

I looked this up the other day just for the fun of it ... and because I had never paused to think why PIs used to be called gumshoes. But according to etymology.com: "plainclothes detective," 1906, from the rubber-soled shoes they wore (which were so called from...

It's the first day of school in our house, and the kids are rather excited. (Don't worry, it'll fade, LOL.) Their desks are organized (that won't last either...), they made their "1st Day of..." signs last night for pictures this morning, picked out their outfits (no...