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: BillTongg@lemmy.world)
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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: Pooptimist@lemmy.world)
This is a pretty common one, but, the color orange was named after the fruit. Not the other way around.
This is a fun one. It comes through Persian and Arabic from the Sanskrit “naranga-s” - which describes the tree. But despite the Dutch adoption of the color, the place name “Orange” in titles like William of Orange is from the Latin name “Arausio”, which probably has Celtic origin.