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Blessed Are the Learned,
Or, The Erratic Behavior of -ED

By Anatoly Liberman It does not surprise us that naked and wretched do not rhyme with raked and etched. But the difference between learned in I have learned a lot in this course and I have seldom met such a learned man is disturbing. In native words and in many borrowings, English has lost most […]

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The Oddest English Spellings (Part 3)

by Anatoly Liberman If we disregard the use of runes, we may say that literacy came to Europe with Christianity. Two exceptions are Greece and Italy. England, like its neighbors, adopted the Roman script, but the sounds of the Germanic languages (and English belongs to the Germanic group of the Indo-European family) were in many […]

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Monthly Gleanings,
May 2006

by Anatoly Liberman Alex, a fifth-grader and so far the youngest reader of this blog, wants to know how to start investigating one’s family name. This question interests many people who study their genealogy. (Pay attention to the spelling: in American English, genealogy rhymes with geology, biology, and philology, but its root is Latin genea […]

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Time and Tide
Wait for a Good Etymologist

by Anatoly Liberman In dealing with a category like time, we have every reason to suppose that in the past the word for it designated something more concrete, for instance, a measurable interval or an observable event. What interval, what event? Scholars facing such questions look for words whose meaning is similar to the one […]

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Playing Fast and Loose with Meaning in the History of Words

by Anatoly Liberman Language changes because so many people speak it and because even today it is impossible to control the norm. A community of English professors left on a desert island and allowed to breed would probably have preserved their sounds, forms, and vocabulary intact for a million years (if this group survived the […]

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Cuckoo Birds in Gawky Park,
Or, Our Etymological Ailing Tooth

by Anatoly Liberman Many years ago, I participated in a meeting of Russian and British students in a town that was then called Leningrad. In the Soviet Union, everything, from theaters and community centers to parks and streets, was named after Gorky. At a certain moment, one of the British students began to giggle. When […]

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Monthly Gleanings

by Anatoly Liberman Martin Chuzzlewit spent some time in America and, following the lead of his creator, Charles Dickens, formed a most unfavorable impression of the country. Soon after his arrival, he met the editors of the Watertoast Gazette, who were sure that Queen Victoria “[would] shake in her royal shoes” when she opened the […]

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Weathering the Weather in Word History

The shape of the word weather has changed little since it was first attested in the year 795. In Old English, it had d in place of th; the rest, if we ignore its present day spelling with ea, is the same. But its range of application has narrowed down to “condition of the atmosphere,” while at that time it also meant “air; sky; breeze; storm.”

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Unsung Heroes of Etymology

By Anatoly Liberman
Those who look up the origin of a word in a dictionary are rarely interested in the sources of the information they find there. Nor do they realize how debatable most of this information is. Yet serious research stands behind even the controversial statements in a modern etymological dictionary.

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The Oddest English Spellings,
Or, the Unhealing Wounds of Tradition (Part 1)

by Anatoly Liberman Once out of school, we stop noticing the vagaries of English spelling and resign ourselves to the fact that rite, right, Wright (or wright in playwright), and write are homophones without being homographs. In most cases such words sounded different in the past, then changed their pronunciation, but retained their spelling. Such […]

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Monthly Etymology Gleanings for March 2006

This blog column has existed for a month. It was launched with the idea that it would attract questions and comments. If this happens, at the end of each month the rubric “Monthly Gleanings” will appear. Although in March I have not been swamped with the mail, there is enough for a full post. Also, one question was asked privately, but in connection with the blog, so that I think I may answer it here.

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Pre-Word History,
Or, Does the Buck Stop Here?

by Anatoly Liberman Modern English is swamped with words borrowed from other languages. One does not have to be a specialist to notice the presence of the Romance element in it or to guess that samovar has come from Russian and samurai, from Japanese. It is the details that, as usual, pose problems. Not only […]

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Words and Things,
Or, Not Sparing the Rod

by Anatoly Liberman Etymology has a place in the world because people want to know why a certain combination of sounds carries the meaning accepted by their community but, as a rule, have no clue to the answer. However, the degree of opacity differs from word to word. Compounds like newspaper and daredevil are more […]

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Words as a Window to the Past

by Anatoly Liberman The entries in the great Oxford English Dictionary (OED) reveal, although, naturally, in broad outline, the documented history of thousands of words. Some of them surfaced in texts more than a millennium ago, others emerged in Chaucer’s works and later, and still others were added to the vocabulary of English within the […]

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