49 Fun Facts About Word

The word 'trivia' comes from Latin 'triviae', which literally meant what?

A spot where three roads met was a public place, so 'trivialis' came to mean commonplace; the modern quiz sense dates only from 1960s college contests.

Bread with a filling is named after an 18th-century English aristocrat with what title?

John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, reputedly asked for meat between bread so he could keep gaming without leaving the table, and the dish took his title.

'Quarantine' comes from the Venetian word for what period of time?

Venetian 'quaranta giorni' means forty days, the period ships from plague ports were held offshore before anyone could land; Ragusa had begun with a thirty-day 'trentino' in 1377.

The word 'salary' derives from the Latin word for which substance?

'Salarium' comes from Latin 'sal', salt; Pliny linked the soldiers' allowance to salt, though whether they were literally paid in salt is disputed.

The 'mare' in 'nightmare' originally referred to what?

The word has no etymological link to the horse; the folkloric mare brought frightening dreams by pressing on the sleeper.

The word 'robot' entered English from a 1920 play written in which language?

Karel Čapek's Czech play R.U.R. (1920) introduced 'robot'; he credited his brother Josef with coining it from 'robota', the Czech word for forced labour.

'Sabotage' comes from a French word for what item?

'Sabot' is a French wooden shoe; 'saboter' first meant to clatter in clogs or bungle work, and the tale of workers throwing shoes into machinery is probably apocryphal.

'Avocado' traces back to a Nahuatl word that also served as the word for what?

Molina's 16th-century Nahuatl dictionary glosses 'ahuacatl' as both the fruit and the testicle; Spanish 'aguacate' and then English 'avocado' followed.

'Muscle' comes from the Latin 'musculus', meaning what?

A flexed biceps was thought to look like a mouse moving under the skin.

According to the most accepted theory, 'OK' began in the late 1830s as a jokey abbreviation of what?

Boston newspapers in 1839 used 'o.k.' for the jokey misspelling 'oll korrect'; the 1840 Van Buren campaign's 'Old Kinderhook' clubs then spread it nationally.

What is the name for the dot above a lowercase i or j?

The tittle is the small dot above lowercase i and j; the word survives in the biblical phrase 'one jot or one tittle' (Matthew 5:18).

What is the longest non-technical dictionary word, meaning "the act of estimating something as worthless"?

'Floccinaucinihilipilification' strings together Latin words for 'nothing' (flocci, nauci, nihili, pili); William Shenstone used it in a 1741 letter.

Roughly how many letters long is the full chemical name of the protein titin?

Titin's systematic name runs to about 189,800 letters (189,819 by the usual count), listing every amino acid; dictionaries exclude such open-ended chemical nomenclature.

Who introduced the word 'palindrome' to English in 1638?

Henry Peacham's 1638 'The Truth of Our Times' gives the word's first recorded English use; the concept is far older, as the first-century Sator Square shows.

'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is the best-known English example of what?

A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet; Western Union used this one to test telex equipment, and the novel Ella Minnow Pea hunts for a shorter one.

'Brunch' and 'smog' are examples of what kind of word?

Portmanteaus were popularised by Lewis Carroll through Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, who explains 'slithy' as lithe plus slimy.

'Boycott' is named after Captain Charles Boycott, a land agent shunned in which country in 1880?

Boycott was a land agent in County Mayo, Ireland; Charles Stewart Parnell urged the Land League to shun such men, and the surname became a verb within months.

'Silhouette' takes its name from Étienne de Silhouette, who held what job in 1759 France?

Silhouette was Louis XV's finance minister (Controller-General) in 1759; his Seven Years' War austerity measures made his name a byword for anything cheap, like a cut-paper shadow portrait.

A word like 'cleave' or 'sanction' that can mean its own opposite is called what?

A contronym (also 'Janus word', after the two-faced Roman god) carries opposite senses: 'cleave' means both split and cling, 'sanction' both permit and penalise.

Which fruit is the classic example of an English word with no perfect rhyme?

Orange has no perfect rhyme in standard English; poets resort to near-rhymes such as 'door hinge', and the Welsh hill Blorenge is the famous proper-noun exception.

Which 1486 English text popularised fanciful animal collective nouns such as an 'exaltation' of larks?

The Book of Saint Albans (1486) printed a long list of 'terms of venery' including an 'exaltation' of larks and a 'gaggle' of geese; Wynkyn de Worde's 1496 reprint spread them further.

Which American architect invented Scrabble, valuing letters by their frequency in newspapers?

Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect, devised Lexiko in 1931 and Criss-Crosswords in 1938, counting letters on the New York Times front page; James Brunot renamed it Scrabble in 1948.

Which two letters are worth 10 points each in English Scrabble?

Q and Z are the only ten-point tiles in English Scrabble; J and X score eight, K five, and the common letters E, A, I, O, N, R, T, L, S and U just one.

Wordle was created by a Welsh software engineer with what surname?

Wardle built it for his partner and released it publicly in October 2021; the Times paid a 'low seven-figure sum'.

How many attempts does a Wordle player get to guess the five-letter word?

The shareable grid of coloured emoji squares, added late in 2021, is what turned it into a worldwide habit.

In which year did the Oxford English Dictionary begin publication?

The first fascicle, A to Ant, appeared in 1884 under James Murray; the Philological Society had begun the project in 1857, and the 1989 second edition ran to 20 volumes.

Which children's author gave us the first recorded use of the word 'nerd', in 1950?

Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo (1950) lists a 'Nerd' among the creatures Gerald McGrew wants to collect; the slang sense surfaced in Newsweek the next year.

Which word did Frank Neuhauser spell to win the very first National Spelling Bee in 1925?

Eleven-year-old Frank Neuhauser spelled 'gladiolus' to win the 1925 bee, which the Louisville Courier-Journal had organised by consolidating local contests.

The ampersand was once commonly recited as the 27th letter of what?

Its shape is a ligature of the Latin 'et', and its name comes from children chanting 'and per se and' at the end of the alphabet.

The placeholder text 'Lorem ipsum' is a scrambled passage from which Roman writer?

The passage is mangled from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum (45 BC), as Richard McClintock showed; Letraset transfer sheets made it standard in the 1960s.

'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' comes from which 1964 film?

The Sherman Brothers wrote it for Mary Poppins (1964), sung by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke; it placed 36th on the AFI's list of top film songs.

The respelling 'ghoti', used to mock English spelling, is meant to be pronounced like which word?

'Ghoti' spells 'fish': gh as in 'enough', o as in 'women', ti as in 'nation'; the joke is often credited to George Bernard Shaw but predates him.

'Spoonerism' is named after the sound-swapping Warden of which Oxford institution?

The Reverend William Archibald Spooner was Warden of New College from 1903 to 1924, after decades as a fellow there; the OED records 'spoonerism' from 1900.

'Malapropism' comes from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in which 1775 play?

Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) built her name on the French 'mal à propos'; Shakespeare's Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing mangled words the same way nearly two centuries earlier.

A misheard song lyric that creates a new meaning is called a 'mondegreen' after a mishearing of what?

Sylvia Wright coined it in a 1954 Harper's essay after hearing 'The Bonnie Earl o' Moray' as ending with 'and Lady Mondegreen'.

'Onomatopoeia' comes from a Greek compound meaning what?

Greek 'onoma' (name) plus 'poiein' (to make) gives 'name-making', coining a word from a sound, as in 'buzz', 'hiss' and 'cuckoo'.

'Bankrupt' comes from the Italian 'banca rotta', which means what?

'Banca rotta' is Italian for 'broken bench'; the tale that a defaulting moneylender's bench was smashed in the marketplace is doubted by historians, but the phrase is real.

'Dord', printed in Webster's New International Dictionary in 1934, is famous as what?

A slip reading 'D or d' (abbreviations for density) was misread as a single word, and it survived for years before anyone noticed.

Which organisation has chosen a Word of the Year since 1990, making its list the oldest of its kind?

The American Dialect Society has voted on a Word of the Year since 1990 (the first was 'bushlips'); its vote is held by linguists in January, after the year ends.

Noah Webster published his comprehensive American dictionary, which fixed spellings like 'color', in which year?

Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1828, 22 years after his smaller Compendious Dictionary of 1806; it ran to some 70,000 entries.

'Whisky' derives from the Gaelic 'uisce beatha', a translation of which Latin phrase?

'Uisce beatha' renders Latin 'aqua vitae', water of life; Edinburgh's Guild of Surgeon Barbers was granted a monopoly on making aqua vitae in 1505.

The interrobang combines a question mark with which other punctuation mark?

The interrobang fuses a question mark with an exclamation mark; American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed it in 1962 for surprised or rhetorical questions.

What do you call a word or phrase formed by rearranging all the letters of another, using each exactly once?

An anagram let Galileo announce his discovery of Saturn's strange shape in 1610 as a scrambled Latin sentence, staking his claim without revealing it.

In Middle English, the word 'nice' originally meant what?

'Nice' came via Old French from Latin 'nescius', ignorant, and in Middle English meant foolish or silly; the senses 'precise' and then 'pleasant' arrived centuries later.

What is the term for a word that occurs only once within a text, or a language's entire written record?

Hapax legomenon is Greek for 'said once'; in large text collections around 40 to 60 percent of distinct words appear only a single time.

Splitting one word in two to insert another inside it, as in 'abso-blooming-lutely', is a figure of speech called what?

Tmesis was common in Homer, where a verb prefix had not yet fused with its verb, and appears in Ovid's Latin poetry.

The word 'acronym' combines '-nym' for name with the Greek root 'akro-', meaning what?

In the narrow sense acronyms are pronounced as words, like NASA or laser, while letter-by-letter forms such as GDP are initialisms.

Which 1516 coinage combines the Greek for 'no' and 'place'?

Thomas More coined 'Utopia' for his 1516 book from Greek 'ou' (not) and 'topos' (place), 'no-place', punning on 'eu-topos', the good place.

Which sixth-century BCE poet, who disliked the letter sigma, wrote the most ancient known lipogram?

Lasus of Hermione, born around 548 BCE, composed odes without the letter sigma, whose sound he disliked; Athenaeus records his lost 'Centaurs' and 'Hymn to Demeter' as sigma-free.