In expressing that feeling of it being "pretty nice right here" I am actually not thinking of home as humble. The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation for humble is extracted from a sermon dated to the year 1250 and carries a definitions of: Having a low estimate of one's importance, worthiness, or merits.

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Two chemists were trying to figure out why a chemical reaction was behaving in a certain way when one pulled out his pocket watch and undid the chain that secured it to his vest. He wiggled it theorizing on the analogy to the chemical reaction and invented the phrase "chain reaction."

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This seems to be a word that?like amateur?started out as a good thing but has come down to us as a bit of a not-so-good thing.

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The French might be seen as great cooks these days but the etymology of the word cuisine reveals the dirty little secret that they learned it from someone else.

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it seems that somewhere back in the mists of time people started thinking that setting something free with the word liber wasn't highfalutin enough and felt the need to add a de to it without actually changing the meaning

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The Dutch parent word is from a Germanic source and so maps pretty nicely to the English components free and boot that came to us from Old English and its Germanic roots. In this case boot doesn't mean the thing you pull onto your foot.

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The Dutch term for a pirate was vrijbuiter and this appears to have quite quickly have been mutated in English mouths into filibuster.

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how did a group of monks give their name to a fancy coffee drink?

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this was the second coming for the word into English because we see citations for it hundreds of years before, but that first time it mutated into another English word slander and so scandal had to be rediscovered

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in some ways in an ancient world view, dwarves were seen on a par with the gods

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both coffee and tea show up in the written record in the same year?1598?and in the same document, but tea came out as chaa and didn't turn up again as tea until 1655

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Shortly after the word porcupine waddled its way into English the French king Louis XII came to the throne. He brought with him the fearsome symbol of his family crest, the terror-inspiring porcupine.

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The theory is that "turmoil" arose from Old French and meant a container that was part of a mill. The container was always in motion to shake the grain into the grindstone of the mill.

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Groucho Marx was accepted as a member of a very exclusive club called the Friar's Club and then sent them a telegram saying "Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member."

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This is just a quick non-episode of podictionary to let subscribers know that the Oxford University Press blog feed for my Thursday episodes can now be found in the iTunes podcast directory. If you use iTunes you can subscribe to the OUPblog feed most easily by clicking here or on the iTunes image. You can also go [...]

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You might wonder how he gets away with it. For instance if I wanted to call my book The Oxford Dictionary of Body Parts I might just hear from an attorney

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Last summer I had the pleasure of meeting Johnny Carrera. Johnny Carrera is a dictionary artist. I bet you never even knew such a thing existed.

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Sparkle goes back to spark which the written record shows us as an Old English word used at least as early as the year 725. Before that the earlier path of this word remains dark and neither the OED nor others can tell us much about where it came from since it doesn't show up in many other languages. Our sense of sparkle as a more twinkling or brilliant point of light doesn't begin to show up until about 100 years after Wycliffe's death. Then 100 years later, around Shakespeare's time?about 1600?meanings relating to sparkling glances and sparkling personalities finally emerge.

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In the play Hamlet the suicidal lead character's famous line talks about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Hamlet is not talking about fortune taking out its rage on him. For Hamlet the slings and arrows just weren't being fair. The troubles he was having to suffer were just right over the top.

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This is another non-episode of podictionary. Sometimes when you are looking for a web page instead of the information you want, your browser serves up “404 - not found.” Voicemail audio clip: Charles, this is Bruce Mar. It was not lost on me, the irony that as I was listening to my podcast this morning on [...]

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