Etymologie
8 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- "Sahara Desert" literally means "Desert Desert".
Sahara is Arabic for "deserts", Gobi is Mongolian for "desert". Such doublings arise when a name is borrowed from one …
- Istanbul is probably just Greek for "in the city".
To Greeks, Constantinople was simply "the City", i Polis. The most likely origin of "Istanbul" is the everyday phrase …
- The English alphabet once had 27 letters.
The & sign is a ligature of e and t, Latin "et", attested since the 1st century. In 19th-century America schoolchildren …
- The colour orange has only existed since oranges arrived.
In English, "orange" as a colour name is first recorded in 1502, in a list of clothes bought for Margaret Tudor. Before …
- The word "robot" was invented in Prague in 1920.
Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R. ("Rossum's Universal Robots") gave the world the word; it premiered on 2 January 1921 in …
- Tomato, chili, avocado and coyote are words you say in Aztec.
Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, is still spoken by over a million people in Mexico and hides in your kitchen …
- Wales, Wallonia and Wallachia share one name: "foreigners".
Germanic peoples called their Romance- or Celtic-speaking neighbours *walhaz, derived from the Celtic tribe of the …
- Whether you say "tea" or "chai" reveals the trade route.
Almost every language has one of two words for tea. "Cha" from Cantonese and Mandarin travelled overland: Persian chay …