One of the most powerful words you’ll ever hear — and one of the most poignant — isn’t in dictionaries yet. But it probably will be one day. The word is endling, and it means “the last surviving member of a species.” The...
Adriana from Miami, Florida, says she and her Cuban-American friends and family use the terms fulano, fulanito, and fulanito de tal as the Spanish equivalent of John Doe. These terms for “so and so” came into Spanish from Arabic fulan...
You may have a favorite word in English, but what about your favorite in another language? The Spanish term ojalá is especially handy for expressing hopefulness and derives from Arabic for “God willing.” In Trinidad, if you want to ask...
You may have a favorite word in English, but how about one from another language? Martha likes the Spanish term ojalá because it’s handy for expressing hopefulness, and has an interesting history, deriving from inshallah, Arabic for “God...
We have books for language-lovers and recommendations for history buffs. • How did the word boondoggle come to denote a wasteful project? The answer involves the Boy Scouts, a baby, a craft project, and a city council meeting. • Instead of reversing...
Our conversation about slang terms for traveling by foot prompted an email from Tom in Canton, Texas, who reports that while living in Israel, he used to hear fellow high school students say in Arabic that they were taking bus number 11, the long...