The verb to eke, as in to eke out a living or eke out a win, derives from Old English eaca, meaning “addition” or “supplement.” The expression an eke name, or literally “an additional name” was later altered by...
Camden from Juneau, Alaska, uses the term gaffle to mean “snag,” as in to gaffle a Coke from the fridge. In his 1872 work A Dictionary of Etymology (Bookshop|Amazon), philologist Hensleigh Wedgwood notes that in a variety of languages...
In Spanish, you might refer to your sweetheart as your media naranja, or “half orange,” the idea being that an orange sliced perfectly in half has two mirror images — in other words, the perfect match. The Spanish word media can mean...
Nick from San Antonio, Texas, says his father used to use the word tiffin to denote a meal or snack made of leftovers. It’s a word borrowed from Indian English which was itself borrowed from the English verb tiff, which means “to eat or...
The verb to suss out means “to investigate” or “to get to the bottom of” something. In British police jargon, a suss or sus is “a suspect.” This slang term is older than the video game “Among Us.” In...
An ornithologist says there’s a growing movement to change the name of a pink-footed bird currently called the flesh-footed shearwater. The movement reflects a growing understanding that using flesh-colored for “pink” fails to...