What is love? People have had a hard time answering that question for a lot longer than you might think. In Ancient Greece, love was a concept pondered over by some of history’s most famous philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle. Greek philosophers attempted to explain love rationally and often categorized the different kinds of love people could feel. Because we love them so much, we …
Say cheese! There are a ton of different cheeses out there, and many of them have unique toponyms, or names that are derived from the name of a place. In fact, many cheeses are officially designated by international cheese organizations—yes, that’s a thing—as so-called “protected cheeses,” meaning only a specific place can legally make a certain kind of cheese. Whether they are protected or not, many …
Words are powerful, and a masterful use of words can change the world. At the same time, words have a fun side to them too. While the English language often seems to exist purely to confuse us, English also has a silly side that can make us laugh and smile. Are you skeptical? Well, we have dug deep into the English toy box to find …
Do you know all of your colors? No, we aren’t just talking about red and green. We mean color words like quercitron, puce, and dragon’s blood. There are so many unique and fascinating words that describe shades of color in our language. If you stop at the basics, you might just miss out on some of the most vivid and historically interesting shades that exist. …
![List of words in white outline, with central word in bold purple font, on lilac background: “pseudonym, synonym, caconym, inaptonym [in bold], metonym, backronym, retronym"](https://www.dictionary.com/e/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/20220426_NYM_800x800-380x380.png)
We love to look at words, and today the name of the game is words that end in -nym. The ending -nym or, most often, -onym is a combining form from Greek that means “name.” Apparently, we love naming names because there are a whole bunch of words that end in -nym. Some of these words are pretty common, but we managed to find quite …
For many English-speaking folks, the odds of encountering the French names for the days of the week are pretty low. Sure, you might encounter the French Mardi (Tuesday) every year during Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday” in English), but other examples are few and far between. So, if you feel like your vocabulary is missing that certain je ne sais quoi, then maybe a tiny little …
Poor Dan is in a droop. Sit on a potato pan, Otis. What do these—admittedly very unusual—sentences have in common? They’re palindromes. Palin-what-in-the-what-now? What is a palindrome, and what does it mean? A palindrome is a word, sentence, verse, or even number that reads the same backward or forward. It derives from Greek roots that literally mean “running back” (palin is “again, back,” and dromos, “running.”) …
As any participant in a spelling bee can tell you, correctly spelling words in the English language is not always easy. In most languages, the way words are spelled (graphemes) consistently relate to the way they sound (phonemes). But the English language uses a mix of spellings and pronunciations from Latin, Greek, French, German, and many others. To further confuse matters, words in English have …
The pronunciation of words in English is not always straightforward. Unlike some languages, such as French or Spanish, there is not always a direct relationship between the spelling of words and how they are said aloud. In technical terms, there is not always a consistent relationship between graphemes (basically, writing units) and their phonemes (sounds) in English. There are a couple of reasons for this. The English …
If you take a cursory glance at almost any sheet music, particularly for classical music, you will see a hodgepodge of Italian terms such as piano, staccato, crescendo, just to name a few. How did the Italian language come to dominate musical notation? To answer this question, we need to know a little bit about the history of music. The music staff (a set of …