WORLD WIDE WORDS
New this week
Banausic It’s not a word that you’re likely to overhear in your local pub or read in your daily newspaper. The source is classical Greek banausikos, relating to artisans (from baunos, a forge), though in English its meaning has been influenced by ...
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Austerian The austerians — those economists and politicians who believe the only way out of the financial crisis is through painful spending cuts — are in the news at the moment. In Britain it’s because of the visit this week by the International ...
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Earl Grey tea For the most part, etymology isn’t a flashy subject. It needs care and patience rather than academic brilliance and is rarely rewarded by moments of breathtaking insight. But at times a search for the provenance of a term turns ...
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Randomly chosen
Read the riot act These days, it’s just a figurative expression meaning to give an individual or a group a severe scolding or caution, or to announce that some unruly behaviour must cease. But originally it was a deadly serious injunction to ...
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The next website update
The next update to this site is due on 25 May. You should then able to read about the rare word palpebrous, uncover the difference between rotate and revolve and discover the origin of spill the beans. If you had subscribed to my newsletter, you would already have seen them, and more besides.
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About World Wide Words
The English language is forever changing. New words appear; old ones fall out of use or change their meanings. World Wide Words tries to record at least some part of this shifting wordscape by featuring new words, word histories, the background to words in the news, and the curiosities of native English speech.
This site is the archive of pieces that have appeared in the free newsletter. Weekly issues include much more than appears here, including discussion by readers, serendipitous encounters with unfamiliar language, and tongue-in-cheek tut-tuttings at errors perpetrated by sloppy writers.
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