Word-origin Wednesday
- Author: Vários
- Narrator: Vários
- Publisher: Podcast
- Duration: 2:56:44
- More information
Informações:
Synopsis
Word-Origin Wednesday is the weekly podcast that walks you through a word origin in five minutes or less.
Episodes
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Omelet (Word-Origin Wednesday)
12/06/2019 Duration: 03minLike a lot of food-related words, "omelet" comes from French. Its origin has nothing to do with eggs.
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Humble (Word-Origin Wednesday)
05/06/2019 Duration: 03min"Humble" came from French, which took it from Latin. It's always meant "lowly," although that's not how people use it today.
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Lavaliere (Word-Origin Wednesday)
29/05/2019 Duration: 03minA lavaliere is a fancy pendant. It's also a type of microphone. To find the origin, we go back to 17th-century France.
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Memorial (Word-Origin Wednesday)
22/05/2019 Duration: 03min"Memorial" comes from Latin and is related to a slew of other English words, including "remember" and "memorandum."
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Phases Of The Moon (Word-Origin Wednesday)
15/05/2019 Duration: 03min"Waxing," "waning," "crescent" and "gibbous" go back a long, long time.
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Whiskey (Word-Origin Wednesday)
08/05/2019 Duration: 02min"Whiskey" has been through some changes in its journey to English from (no surprise) Gaelic.
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May Day and Mayday (Word-Origin Wednesday)
01/05/2019 Duration: 03minMay 1 is May Day (two words) in the United States. Don't confuse it with "mayday" (one word), the distress call for pilots.
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Verbiage and Verbage (Word-Origin Wednesday)
24/04/2019 Duration: 03minThe often misused "verbiage" has been around for a few centuries, and its corrupt offspring, "verbage," is older than you might think.
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Easter (Word-Origin Wednesday)
17/04/2019 Duration: 03min"Easter" goes back to Old English and then goes back further. Celebrations of spring are older than Jesus.
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Rhythm And Rhyme (Word-Origin Wednesday)
10/04/2019 Duration: 03min"Rhythm" and "rhyme" are related words, both in meaning and etymology.
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Stay-at-Home Parent (Word-Origin Wednesday)
03/04/2019 Duration: 04min"Stay" and "home" and "parent" are old words, going back centuries. Words to describe someone who tends to the home and children are also very old. English speakers began using the term "stay-at-home parent" very recently.
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Leverage (Word-Origin Wednesday)
27/03/2019 Duration: 03min"Leverage" has been in the English language since the 18th century, but its position in everyday corporate speak is fairly recent.
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Tea (Word-Origin Wednesday)
20/03/2019 Duration: 03minTea has been around for thousands of years, but English speakers didn't need a word for it until they started trading it in the 1590s.
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Butt Cheek (Word-Origin Wednesday)
13/03/2019 Duration: 04min"Butt" and "cheek" have been around for centuries. It took a while for English speakers to put them together.
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Ambulance (Word-Origin Wednesday)
06/03/2019 Duration: 03min"Ambulance" has been an English word since the 18th century, before motor vehicles, and is related to the word "amble."
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Selfie (Word-Origin Wednesday)
27/02/2019 Duration: 03min"Selfie" is a fairly new word, but its root word and suffix are centuries old. Some people don't like "selfie," but resistance is futile.
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Hiatus (Word-Origin Wednesday)
28/03/2018 Duration: 02minBy tracing "hiatus," meaning a break, back to its ancient Proto-Indo European roots, we find it has some modern cousins with similar meanings but very different sounds.
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Penultimate (Word-Origin Wednesday)
21/03/2018 Duration: 03min"Penultimate" and its cousin, "ultimate," both come from Latin. As the meaning of "ultimate" shifts, poor "penultimate" is being left behind.
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Carnival (Word-Origin Wednesday)
14/03/2018 Duration: 03minThe current popular meaning of "carnival" goes back to the 1920s, but the original meaning, which involves meat, goes back centuries.
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Buck (Word-Origin Wednesday)
07/03/2018 Duration: 03minWe've been using the word "buck" as slang for money since the 1850s. There are two theories to explain why.