There was a time when porn was a dirty word that referred to something that people in polite society don’t talk about. Today, the word porn is thrown around for a wide range of far less risqué topics. Perhaps you’ve browsed some food porn on social media, for example, or have scanned through a stream of house porn images for decoration inspiration. Porn has become …
A cake can turn any common gathering into a celebration. Simply offering cake can turn an event into a party, and the word itself evokes happy memories of birthdays, weddings, and other festivities (though the phrase let them eat cake has quite a different connotation). Yet what you should expect to see when someone says there will be cake is somewhat up in the air … …
Every year as the weather heats up, grills are dusted off and meats and vegetables are thrown on the fire. To those in the West and many northern cities, this is barbecuing. Just don’t call it that in the South or parts of the Midwest like Kansas City, Mo., because in certain regions, not everything cooked on a grill is called barbecue. The word barbecue means different …
This July 4th weekend, how about taking some time to consider the names of those items you are about to eat? Brace yourself for the short and disputed history of that American grilling favorite: the hot dog. Why do we call hot dogs, well, hot dogs? There are a few schools of thought on the origin of this favorite food. Some think that people commonly …
If you’re a dessert lover, there’s a good chance that you enjoy both a rich coconut cluster cookie as well as a delicate almond cookie with a buttercream center. But which of these treats is a macaroon and which is a macaron? And did you know they were two different, albeit delicious, things? Although most foodies know the difference between these beloved cookies, many people …
In the past few weeks, people lined up at Popeyes, a popular restaurant chain known for its Southern-fried chicken, all over the US to get their hands on a hot and hyped new menu item: a chicken sandwich. On Dictionary.com, meanwhile, we saw our own crowd: searches for pandemonium surged nearly 350% since mid-August, when Popeyes released the sandwich en masse. Searches for pandemonium are …
The origin of the word pizza The word pizza as we now know it is recorded in English in the early 1800s, though early English lexicographer John Florio enters pizza for “a small cake or wafer” in his historically important 1598 Italian-English dictionary. Pizza, of course, is borrowed from Italian, but the deeper ingredients of the word, if you will, are unclear. Some think the Greek pitta (pita, …
Did the dictionary … get it wrong?! We once featured the word comeuppance as our Word of the Day. Comeuppance, as we define it, means “deserved reward or just deserts, usually unpleasant.” More than a few of our brilliant and devoted users, wrote in to inform us that there was a typo in the definition: just deserts should be just desserts. Was an S left out of …
