Facts about language & words
Language facts show how much of everyday speech is historical accident. Words that once meant the opposite, letters that vanished from the alphabet, punctuation with names almost nobody uses. Each entry explains the change that produced the oddity — a sound shift, a printing convention, a borrowing from another language — so it works as a genuine explanation and not just as a piece of trivia.
The word quarantine comes from the Italian for forty days.
During the plague epidemics of the 14th century, Venice made ships wait 40 days, a quaranta giorni, before anyone could come ashore. The practice was first introduced in the port of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, as a 30-day trentino.
The word robot was invented for a play in 1920, from a Czech word for forced labour.
Karel Capek's play R.U.R. featured artificial workers called roboti, from robota, meaning drudgery or serf labour. Capek credited his brother Josef with suggesting the word.
The mare in nightmare has nothing to do with horses. It was a demon that sat on your chest while you slept.
In Germanic folklore, the mare was an evil spirit that rode sleepers and caused bad dreams and a feeling of suffocation. The word survives in Norwegian mareritt and German Nachtmahr.
The sentence The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog uses every letter of the English alphabet.
Sentences like this are called pangrams. This one has been used since the late 1800s to test typewriters, telegraph lines, fonts and keyboards.
The word muscle comes from the Latin for little mouse.
Musculus is the diminutive of mus, mouse. Romans apparently thought a flexing bicep looked like a small mouse moving under the skin.
The dot above a lowercase i or j has a name: a tittle.
The word comes from the Latin titulus, meaning a small mark or title. The dot was added in medieval manuscripts to make the letter i stand out from the strokes of letters like m, n and u around it.
Papua New Guinea has around 840 living languages, more than any other country.
With about ten million people, that is roughly one language for every 12,000 inhabitants. Many languages are spoken by only a few hundred people in a single valley.
The word disaster literally means bad star.
It comes from the Italian disastro, built from dis, meaning ill, and astro, star. In the 16th century a calamity was blamed on an unfavourable position of the planets.
The Spanish word ojalá, meaning I hope so, comes from the Arabic for God willing.
It descends from law sha Allah, and is one of roughly 4,000 Spanish words with Arabic roots. Others include almohada, aceite, azúcar, alcalde and barrio.