I was on another thread and got deep into learning about the history of certain words and thought I’d post here. What word history origins / facts do you know?
I’ll start with two that I recently came across:
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“‘Wer’ (meaning ‘man’) came from Old High German with the Anglo Saxons 1,500 years ago, and was part of Old English. It then became ‘were’ in Middle English and remains as part of werewolf (‘man wolf’) in modern English.” (Source: [email protected])
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“Sculptors in antique Rome could fix mistakes they made by mixing marble dust with wax. If a sculptor was especially gifted and made no mistakes that needed fixing, they would market their art as “sin cera”, which means “without wax”, which is where the word “sincere” comes from.” (Source: [email protected])
The use of the root words chai and tea can be roughly traced to how the leaf was introduced to the language. If the leaf drink came by land, it was generally called chai. If it came by maritime trade, it was more likely to be called té, or tea.