Etymology Now

Meat: It’s what was for dinner. Until around the 13th century, meat and its predecessors simply referred to ‘food,’ be it flora or...

After spending some time looking at how guttural phonemes entered English by way of Norse languages (so barbaric !), I recently found my...

The etymology of powerful terms like ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ reveal a lot about how attitudes about the implications of freedom have chang...

The etymology of doom reveals a lot about the complicated relationship that mankind has had with the concepts of law and judgement througho...

To the uninitiated, golf seems to hold all the charm and promise of a march into the heart of mother Russian in late fall. To players of the...

The United States has pretty much dug in its heels on refusing to acknowledge the sport of football by any other name than soccer. Beneath t...

Following yesterday's etymology of money and its curious relationship to a warning from the gods, I spent a little bit of time before w...