Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Word Origins
In the dictionary game, when you've found a historical example of word that is earlier than anything previously found, it's called an "antedating." Looking for antedatings in American English has been utterly transformed by the advent of digitized newspaper databases. Now, hot on the heels of my antedating of jazz in New Orleans, I have another early 20th-century discovery to report: from 1901, the first known proposal for using the title Ms. to refer to a woman regardless of her marital status.
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New Orleans is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of jazz. But is it also the birthplace of "jazz" — that is, the name for the music and not just the music itself? New evidence shows that the term jazz, also spelled jas or jass in the early days, was in use in New Orleans as early as 1916. However, that doesn't beat Chicago, where the term was applied to music in 1915. And while many of the Windy City's early jazz musicians hailed from New Orleans, Chicago likely borrowed the word jazz from another city: San Francisco.
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I recently made my way to Bloomington, Indiana for the biennial conference of the Dictionary Society of North America, a sublime convergence of unabashed word-nerdery. There was a fascinating array of paper presentations, on everything from grand old men like Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster to cutting-edge techniques in online lexicography. But one paper that I found particularly enjoyable had to do with a Victorian-era "Anglo-Indian glossary" that has had remarkable staying power over the past century or so, perhaps in part due to its memorable title: Hobson-Jobson. The paper, by Traci Nagle of Indiana University, took a look at exactly how the dictionary ended up with such a peculiar name.
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A 47-million-year-old fossil of a newly discovered primate species has been trumpeted in the media as "the missing link" in human evolution. Nicknamed "Ida," the fossil is remarkably well-preserved, but paleontologists have scoffed at the "missing link" claim: it's not even clear if Ida is a close relative of us anthropoids, and in any case, the whole metaphor of "the missing link" only really works in the outdated model of evolution as a linear chain or ladder. But all the hoopla surrounding Ida inspired Nature editor Henry Gee to ask (via Twitter), how long have people been using the expression "the missing link"?
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As in past months, we've asked writer and educator Bob Greenman to pick some piquant words from More Words That Make a Difference, a delightful book illustrating word usage with passages from the Atlantic Monthly. Here Bob focuses on a "cousins club" of words that eviscerate the empty verbiage of others. Rest assured that Bob provides us with neither blather nor piffle.
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"Swine flu is the new Susan Boyle of search terms," announces a headline in Australia's The Age. The Scottish singing sensation was last week's news: people are no longer busy conducting online searches for Ms. Boyle (or for her favored expression, gobsmacked). Instead, they're trying to discover anything they can about swine flu, now that health authorities are warning of a possible pandemic. Let's take a look at how the disease got its name.
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The recent hijacking of the Maersk Alabama cargo ship off the coast of Somalia serves as a chilling reminder that seagoing pirates continue to threaten international waters, from the Gulf of Aden to the Straits of Malacca. For many of us, it's peculiar to see the word pirate making headlines, since it seems so out of place in the 21st century — at least outside of Disney theme parks.
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