Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Holy and whole are almost identical twins. Anatoly Liberman traces Germanic words for holiness, from Gothic weihs and Wulfila’s Bible to Odense’s lost temple, then answers readers on joy, jiggered, and spelling reform.
Why are jig, jog, and jug such etymological nightmares, and where did I’ll be jiggered come from? Anatoly Liberman chases a few sound-imitative j-words, then answers readers who asked who needs spelling reform in the age of spellcheck and AI.
Today (October 24) is World Polio Day, focusing on a communicable disease which the World Health Assembly committed to eradicate in 1988.
After the Spelling Society’s London congress, Anatoly Liberman makes the case for reforming English spelling slowly: drop needless letters in words like acquire, communal, and sufficient, offend no one, and let popular culture help.
Older dictionaries sometimes informed their readers that Modern English has two different verbs: bid “to ask for something” (also “to command”) and bid “to pray.”
Words beginning with shr- ~ schr- ~scr- have bothered me for years, partly because of German Schreck “horror.”
Revision, I’ve been told again and again, is the key to effective writing. Yet sometimes I find myself making an essay or chapter worse when I revise it.
What connects Ghent with John of Gaunt, and are lubber and loblolly related? Anatoly Liberman answers two readers’ questions about names, sounds, and word origins.
Last week, I finished my story with a brief reference to all kinds of gloves. A few days later, a query came about the word gauntlet.
Before attempting to answer the title question, we should be clear about what the term ‘periodicity’ actually means—and where better to turn for an explanation than the matchless OED. The entry under ‘chemistry’ is the most relevant, viz. ‘The complex periodic variation of the properties of the chemical elements with increasing atomic number’, the term’s […]
Below, I’ll speak about the amazing history of the word dung “manure.” In broad outline, the story is known, but some details are seldom discussed in dictionaries.
Few words are harder to trace to their sources than the names of clothing articles. Those names travel with the things to which they belong, and the sources are easily lost sight of.
When I’m reading or listening to a book, I sometimes find myself momentarily drifting away from what the author is saying and worrying about words and phrases I encounter.
It is surprising how similar the verbs in the title sound, though they are antonyms: tarry means “to linger, delay,” while hurry refers to haste.
This is a story about how the fox got its name. I discussed the word fox ten years ago (see the post for March 23, 2016), but today I have more to say about the subject.
It does not require much philological preparation to guess that supper is a word containing the root sup- and the suffix -er. Yet in the days of King Alfred and even much later, the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England had no such word.