I always assumed “midriff” was an opaque word, but it breaks down pretty cleanly. It comes from Old English midhrif: midd “middle” + hrif “belly, womb.”

Hrif goes back to Proto-Germanic *hrifiz, with cognates like Old Frisian rif “belly” and Old High German href “body, womb.” It died out in English as a standalone word and survives only as a fossil inside “midriff.”

Further back, *hrifiz is usually traced to PIE *kʷrep- “body, form, appearance.” That same root is the commonly cited source of Latin corpus “body,” which would make “midriff” a very distant relative of corpse.

$200: This adjective describes when a city (or two cities?) has a dark underbelly of squalid poverty, like in 19th Century Victorian London. What is Dickensian?

$400: This adjective alluding to pleasure gained from cruelty or violence has its roots in the works of a 16th-17th century French nobleman. What is Sadistic?

$600: This adjective can used to describe the type of totalitarian oppressive dystopia evident in a 1949 classic book. What is Orwellian?

$800: The word for this type of idealistic impractical behavior comes from the name of a 16th-17th Spanish author’s delusional (but chivalrous) character. What is Quixotic?

$1000: This word is appropriate to describe being stuck in a maze of senseless bureaucracy or illogical frustrating situations like those in a certain Prague born author’s writing. What is Kafkaesque?

I feel as though I've heard it. And not in the way of asking a boy how he did something. It would be more exclamatory like, "BOY HOW, that building is TALLL!"

If it's relevant I live in the southern US

I'm not an etymology expert, like I know jack shit about diddly squat when it comes to this stuff, but I thought this might be a relevant question for you guys. I couldn't really find anything on the first page of Google and reddit is more fun anyway.

Two years ago I had a successful kickstarter etymology card game. Now it's a video game!

https://www.etymologygame.com/

According to a web-site called ‘etymonline’ (I am unsure if this is a reliable source or not as am not well-versed in etymology itself), the english comes from a meaning about blood.

‘Middle English blessen, from Old English bletsian, bledsian, Northumbrian bloedsian"to consecrate by a religious rite, make holy, give thanks," from Proto-Germanic \blodison"hallow with blood, mark with blood," from *blotham* "blood" (see blood (n.)). Originally a blood sprinkling on pagan altars.’

— etymonline entry

I know, from personal experience, that the French verb se blesser means to injure or hurt oneself, which one can certainly link to blood, quite easily. Is there an actual link between these words, or is it just happenstance?

ie. plaque on your teeth vs plaque award vs plaque to read (ie. museums)

did they come from the same root?

And even Hungarian, Estonian and Finnish, but none of the other Germanic languages.

Old High German: zil
    Middle High German: zil
        German: Ziel
            Hunsrik: Ziel
            → Bulgarian: цел (cel)
            → Czech: cíl
            → Hungarian: cél
                → Romanian: țel, țil
            → Macedonian: цел (cel)
            → Polish: cel, cyl, czel (Middle Polish)
                → Belarusian: цэль (celʹ)
                → Esperanto: celo
                → Kashubian: cél
                → Slovincian: cél
                → Russian: цель (celʹ), цѣль (cělʹ) — pre-1918 spelling
                    → Yakut: сыал (sïal)
                → Ukrainian: ціль (cilʹ)
            → Serbo-Croatian:
                Cyrillic script: ци̑љ
                Latin script: cȋlj
            → Slovak: cieľ
            → Slovene: cilj
        → Old Czech: cíl, cíľ (alternative writing)
            Czech: cíl
            Old Polish: cel
                Polish: cel, cyl, czel (Middle Polish)
                    → Belarusian: цэль (celʹ)
                    → Esperanto: celo
                    → Kashubian: cél
                    → Slovincian: cél
                    → Russian: цель (celʹ), цѣль (cělʹ) — pre-1918 spelling
                        → Yakut: сыал (sïal)
                    → Ukrainian: ціль (cilʹ)
                Silesian: cyl
→ Proto-Finnic: *tila
    Estonian: tila
    Finnish: tila (“room, space”)

Edit: I proofread the title like three times, but still missed a word :/

I was at a conference recently with people from lots of nations, many of whom were multilingual. As a local host I took a group of them on a wine-tasting excursion, and as the day progressed we started making jokes about each other's nation's beverages and drinking cultures.

I'm an American living abroad, and so of course the subject of American beer came up. I told the old joke:

Q: How is American beer like having sex in a canoe?
A: They're both fucking close to water.

My new Canadian, Irish, and South African friends got it immediately, but our Taiwanese and German friends took a moment to translate the joke in their heads, and I think it didn't land.

It's not a great joke so I wouldn't be surprised if they just didn't think it was funny, but it led me to wonder how common it is for a language to use a word for coitus as an transgressive version of "very". I'm guessing there would be cultural reasons for using a rude word as a superlative but I'm not sure if there are different patterns in different languages or cultures.

Do any of you smart wordwizards know about this?

EDIT: I used the wrong word (in an etymology sub no less!). It's not a superlative, it's an intensifier.

Okay English linguists…

Why do we say, “I lost my virginity?” Surely it should be “I’m no longer a virgin” or “I gave my virginity to so and so.”

Why do we refer to it as something one can misplace? It’s not like you can find it again.

Can you imagine? “Oh look! Someone forgot their virginity, better get this to lostand found.

“Oh no Bob another missing cat. Must be some cougars in the area.”

“I’d say so Earl. Look at this! Three more posters over here. One dog and two for virginity.”

​

At what point do two languages stop being dialects, are there specific parameters that distinguish a language from a dialect, like I know the Chinese government considers the Chinese languages dialects of each other to maintain the perception of a homogeneous nation, but at what point did Tamil and Malayalam stop being dialects and become two independent languages?

My writings in the neuroanatomy of the mind/body interface have led me to contemplate an interesting the homophonic and potential cognate pairing of cord as in ‘spinal cord’ and caudal (‘tail-end’ as counter polar to cephalic (‘at the head end’). ‘Cord’ appears to come from the PIE ghere- ‘intestine’ while ‘caudal’ is from the Latin cauda ‘tail’ – whose earlier forms seem less clear. But, in terms of differentiating the distinct parts of the CNS (central nervous system) of the *brain vs the spinal cord, the homophony of this being its caudal part is somewhat tantalising to me as an amateur linguist and natural philosopher – retired from a main career as a mind/body doctor.

I've been reading about the etymology of the word "China" and its connection to the Khitan people (契丹). From my basic research, I know that:

• "Cathay" entered English via Marco Polo's accounts and was used in medieval Europe.
• "Kitay" (Китай) is still the standard word for China in Russian and several other Slavic/Turkic languages.
• Modern English eventually shifted to "China" (likely from Sanskrit "Cina" via Persian), leaving "Cathay" as a poetic or archaic term.

What I'm curious about is the historical and linguistic divergence: Why did English and most Western European languages settle on the "China" root, while Russian and its neighbors kept the "Khitan/Cathay" root? Was it purely a matter of trade routes (land vs. sea), or were there other political/cultural factors at play?

Would appreciate any historical context or references to early modern English usage! Thanks!

I am an English student interested in translation. How can understanding the origin and history of a word help translators choose the correct meaning in another language?

Many female names in European languages are derived from male names (Johanna, Harriet, Martina/Martine, etc). What examples are there of male names being derived from female names? I'm curious about all languages, not just European, although that was my frame of reference for this question.

hello, I'm a dumb, stupid artist and I have a couple word building projects but I always curl up and die on naming things, at first my solution was to look at obscure languages but that's probably distasteful, obviously I don't want to be distasteful while making dinky projects like a "Prehistoric Fantasy world" or any of my other projects so I thought getting into etymology would help me actually name things in my projects, animals, plants, locations, habitats, people, etc. so, where should I start in learning etymology?

The ancient Greeks named Egypt “Αἴγυπτος” (Aíguptos), likely deriving it from “ḥwt-kꜣ-ptḥ” (“the temple of the ka of Ptah”), the Egyptian name for the temple of the god Ptah in Memphis, which was also used by metonymy for the city itself.

Several Egyptian religious records show that Ptah was considered a creator god and a patron deity of craftsmen, artists, and architects.

One of these records is the Shabaka Stone, an ancient Egyptian slab probably first erected in Ptah’s temple in Memphis. It was inscribed around 700 BCE, during the reign of Pharaoh Shabaka, and its text claims to be a copy of an earlier papyrus he found in the temple.

The stone was at one point moved to Alexandria, then taken to England and transferred to the British Museum in 1805, where it remains today.

The kꜣ (ka, hieroglyph 𓂓) was an Egyptian concept close to the idea of “vital essence”. Egyptians believed that either Heqet or Meskhenet was the creator of each person’s kꜣ, breathing it into them at the instant of their birth.

The graph was made on miraris.app (a site I made that lets you see etymology trees for any Wiktionary word).

You can interact with the etymology tree for Egypt here, and see the sources used to build it.

I hope you find this etymology as interesting as I do!

Other sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptah
• https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptah
• https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA498
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabaka_Stone
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_conception_of_the_soul

Is there a word with a similar ending as "misogyny", "misandry", or "miscegeny" that has to do with discrimination on a racial basis?

The Greek sarx - flesh - has given us a few words.

Many people know about the sarcophagus - literally flesh-consumer - as limestone coffins were supposedly capable of dissolving human remains.

Sarcopenia is the medical term for the loss of body mass, most noticeably muscle mass, that usually accompanies old age.

But thanks to the inestimable Susie Dent on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Unspeakable’ this morning I learned a new one. Sarcasm. Greek grammarians adapted the noun sarkasmos to describe a biting, cutting remark—a verbal "tearing of flesh" where a speaker smiles while wounding someone with insincere words.

hi hi !! so my surname is i think came from spanish due to the philippines being colonized by spain for 333 years.

but i tried to find sources to find the meaning of my surname but couldn't find any that seemed legitimate :/

i might as well try here hehe

thank you for your help