Etymology is the study of the origins of words and how their usage has changed over time. It's every bit the serious academic discipline you might expect it to be — except when it's not. As it turns ...

Claim: The death benefits paid to the beneficiaries of soldiers who died in battle were often enough to pay off the mortgage on the family home or farm, hence the deceased was said to have "bought the ...

Over the years, physicists have given names to the smallest constituents of our universe. This pantheon of particles has grown alongside progress in physics. Anointing a particle with a name is not ...

Where does the word “mother” come from? What does it mean? If, for some reason, you find yourself asking these questions, read on (and, as an aside, you might need to seek some professional help). For ...

Brad Rappaport from Brooklyn writes: “Recently, I read in my dictionary that the origin of the word ‘religion’ lies in the Latin word ligare, to bind. I found this interesting, not only because of the ...

For many architects writing is an integral part of the design process, one that clarifies or pushes ideas into places sketches can't always reach. But for many, the origins of the words we use to ...

John Leland kicks off his entertaining new book, Hip: The History, with a seductive little linguistic anecdote. The word hip, he says, derives from the West African language Wolof, and was “cultivated ...