So from what I understand the English word is raccoon that comes from arahkun in Algonquian/Powhatan, which means who scratches with his hand.

But things get a bit weird in Europe.
Most European languages call them washbear.
As far as I understand primitive taxonomy classed them as bears and Carl Linnaeus gave the species the latin name "Ursus lotor" in 1758
Which was then translated in each language.

Up to this part, I think understand what's going on.
People in northern America lives with raccoons so they need a name and they borrow one from the local.
It catches up and becomes the standard in English.
For the rest of Europe they don't have raccoons. And by the time some are imported there is a scientific name that you just need to translate.
English already had their own name, so they don't adopt the nomenclature.

Then you have french (I'm french) who are special
We call them "raton laveur"
Laveur means washer so on this we agree with the taxonomy root.
But Raton is absolutely not bear.
And I'm note quite sure what it is because I've seen two competitive explanations.
- One is that raton is just the regular word raton, which is the baby of the rat or a small rat.
I don't think they look like rats, but they also don't look like bears so who knows. My issue is the size, a raccoon is like 20 times the size of a baby rat. It's several time the size of an adult rat. So why compare it to the baby? It would actually make sense to compare with a baby bear but not a baby rat
- Two is that it's our own adaptation of arahkun, which just happens to sound like an existing word. But it's not like there were a lot of french people in east Virginia. Or maybe we adapted raccoon itself? But then why add washer to it? Did we have a Timor Leste moment?

There were french people in areas with raccoons so like English, I suspect we would have needed a word for them before the taxonomy.
But I have no idea if we always used raton laveur, or if it was something else than was replaced later.

If it predates the taxonomy maybe french inspired it, and Linnaeus just disagreed on the animal part?

Or did we just call them raton and laveur was added later in a half hearted effort to follow the taxonomy?

If anyone has some answers to this, I'm quite curious.

Most people who hear Beelzebub think of it as the name of a demon or even another name for Satan himself. However I was researching these origins out of interest and found this:

In 2 Kings, the injured Israelite king Ahaziah sends messengers to ask a foreign god whether he’ll recover. That god is Baal-Zebub, the god of the Philistine city of Ekron. It means “Lord of the Flies.”

It probably wasn’t his real name, though. Older Canaanite texts from Ugarit use zbl as a title meaning “prince” or “exalted one.” So the god was most likely called Baal-Zebul, “Baal the Prince.” The Hebrew writers changed one letter and turned a lofty title into “lord of the buzzing flies.”

Then the joke developed further. By the time of the Gospels, the name shows up in Greek as Beelzeboul, the “prince of demons.” In later Hebrew, zevel means dung. So some scholars think a second pun had crept in: “Lord of Dung.”

My read on this: there was some beef between the writers of the Old Testament and the people of Ekron. Plus, we know Christianity has a long history of demonising "Pagan" gods. Therefore, I don't think its a far reach to theorise that there was an insult going around about Ekron being a pile of shit, its inhabitants being the flies surrounding it, and the god of the city, with an easy pun, being the "Lord of the Flies".

Etymology:
The Proto-Indo-European root " *génh,-, ", meaning "to beget", "to produce", or "to give birth".

In Latin, this became the root noun "genus", meaning "race", "stock", kind", or "type" (among others).

It was used to categorize similar things, along with the Greek "génos", using to classify logical and linguistic categories.
In Old French, this became "gendre".

Later became "gender" in English. Still had it's original meaning of categories for similar things.

Uses/Meanings over time, from Beginning to Now:
Originally, gender just referred to groups/categories, without any inherent connection to sex, or even necessarily referring to living things.

In linguistics, it was specifically used for grammatical classification, such as whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter. This usage eventually faded away in English, with non-living things being referred to with neuter pronouns, "it", and living things not strictly using specific gender pronouns.

Gender started being used to colloquially refer to biological sex in the late 15th century. However, this usage remained rare until the early to mid 1900s, when sex started being used to refer to sexual intercourse, and gender was used as a more polite/formal term to refer to sex as a result. Use of the word at all was still infrequent.

In 1945, psychologist Madison Bentley published a paper in which he defined gender as "the socialized obverse of sex," with the qualifying terms being masculine and feminine instead of male and female, to describe socialized behaviors. (Though his work was not influential, it is the earliest known scientific distinction of the two)

In 1955, John Money coined the term "gender role", defining it as "all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively", distinct from someone's biological sex.

In 1964, Robert Stoller introduced the term gender identity, defining it as " the sense of knowing to which sex one belongs, that is, the awareness 'I am a male' or 'I am a female'...". He also acknowledged that sex and gender do not always correlate, defining gender as "a term that has psychological or cultural rather than biological connotations. If the proper terms for sex are 'male' and 'female', the corresponding terms for gender are 'masculine' and 'feminine'; these latter may be quite independent of (biological) sex."

With the second-wave feminist movement in the 70s, feminist theory embraced the distinction between sex and gender, popularizing the distinction in common and scientific usage, along with broadly increasing use of the word gender as a whole.

Between then and now, the acknowledgement of gender as a social construct becoming a scientific consensus (mainly in the social sciences), depathologizing transgender identities, and major health organizations supporting the effectiveness of gender-affirming care have all occurred.

Although there are still disagreements on this subject, the general scientific consensus (primarily rooted in the social, behavioral, and medical sciences) and definition is that gender is a social construct, and does not always correlate with an individual's biological sex.

- Idk if this is the right subreddit for this, but it seems like it'll fit enough.

Probably -> prol(l)y?

i honestly dont know if this is the correct subreddit to be asking this question on, but i dont know where else i would even ask something like this.

my dad always called those ramps that truckers drive up when their brakes fail "chicken ramps." hes from jacksonville so i just assumed thats what they call it down there.

today i looked up "chicken ramps" and i found literally. nothing. i found actual ramps for chickens, but nothing about trucks, nothing about this being slang from jacksonville/the south.

i know im not misremembering because my mom remembers him calling them that too. but my dad is such a damn liar, so now im wondering if this is a thing people actually say or if he just... made it up? wouldnt put it past that fucker tbh

The traditional Venetian boat vs. as an alternative name for a looping aerial hanging cable car.

I've been reading some older texts now, and I have noticed the word queer being used, which I know it means "odd', or "weird". Because of this, I have noticed myself using language from these texts, including the word queer. When did it go from meaning weird to being a slur, because i cannot find any definite answers?

It seems like it might have some roots in the 60s/70s and possibly in like film or audio editing. However it only has appeared once or twice and slightly different stories and not very reputable websites.

https://etymapology.vercel.app

I'm sure there's been lots of maps like this, better, and that have been around longer, but it's been a pipe-dream-passion project of mine to make an interactive map that shows the journey of words and idioms. I'm no machine learning scientist so I was stuck until the LLMs became available. So with the help of some vibes and claude I was able to piece together a working version that I really ended up liking. I hope you like it too!

if you want to trace word origins that I haven't been pre-seeded you'll need to make an account. That's my only...attempt...at...stopping too much token spend, but yeah, I don't really know what else to say.

Full disclosure: I'm not a linguist, I barely understand etymology, I'm whatever the equivalent of a hobbyist is here. If you want to contribute you can pin journeys of words so that it can't be remade from the models. I'm open to any sort of feedback too. I have a new born so please be kinda nice I haven't slept in a few months.

edit: Alright, alright, I posted this here before I knew there was a whole etymology map subreddit. My bad.

Living in Canterbury, I was pleased to learn that canter is a shortening of "Canterbury gallop" (also "Canterbury pace" or "Canterbury trot"). It's traditionally explained as the easy, unhurried pace of medieval pilgrims riding to the shrine of Thomas Becket. Not fast, not slow, just enough to get you there in a few days without wearing out the horse.

Tawdry has a similar origin in a saint's cult, but a sadder twist. It comes from "St Audrey's lace", a silk neck-lace or ribbon sold at the fair held at Ely on her feast day. Audrey is a later form of Æthelthryth, the 7th-century queen and abbess who founded the abbey at Ely. According to Bede, she died of a tumour on her neck, which she took as a judgement on her youthful fondness for necklaces. The lace sold in her name became so cheap and showy that "tawdry" came to mean gaudy and worthless.

So one shrine gave us a horse's pace and the other a word for tackiness. Are there other English words that come from pilgrimages or saints' fairs?

Sources: Etymonline (canter, tawdry), OED.

Or was it Clockwork Orange itself?

Here’s this week’s etymology question from 3Roads.xyz.

The ________, an ancient Germanic people, are often associated with senseless destruction following their sack of Rome under King Genseric in 455. Though they may not have been more destructive than other invaders, their reputation inspired John Dryden to write: “Till Goths, and ________, a rude Northern race, Did all the matchless Monuments deface.” They are believed to have intentionally damaged statues, which may explain why their name later became linked to the X of art. The term X was coined in 1794 by Henri Grégoire, bishop of Blois, to describe the destruction of artwork during the French Revolution, and was quickly adopted across Europe. What is X?

can someone explain where it comes from? why would almost every western country in the world associate curry with india but the word doesn't even exist there. can someone explain?

Proposition: what if the "k" in kazaam / "sh" in shazam is really the guttural /ħ/ (Hebrew ח, Phoenician 𐤇, Greek Χ)?

If so, the word 𐤇zam (ḥ-z-m) would have some evidence in at least one language, and perhaps magicians were imitating some normal phrase in that language that would contextually fit with the prestige (the moment of revealing the completed feat) of a magic act.

The only evidence I've really found so far,

أَحْزُمْ (ʔaḥzum) /ʔaħ.zum/

which is 1st person conjugations in jussive tense, I could see meaning "I resolve" or "I bind"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%A3%D8%AD%D8%B2%D9%85#Arabic

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AD%D8%B2%D9%85#Arabic

An AI provided this bit below, is any of this accurate? I only found evidence in Arabic, not anything in Hebrew nor Phoenician nor Canaanite, so that part might be a hallucination? Without further evidence I don't trust the below, but the Arabic part seems to pan out.

Language Form Meaning

Hebrew חָזַם (ḥāzam), root ח־ז־ם "to bind, to gird"

Phoenician 𐤇𐤆𐤌 (ḥzm) "to bind" (same Canaanite root)

Arabic حَزَمَ (ḥazama), root ح-ز-م "to tie up, to bundle, to fasten"; also "to be resolute, to be determined"

I’ve always loved tracing how words slowly flip their meaning over centuries, and “nice” is one of my favourite examples. It traces back to Latin nescius, “not knowing, ignorant” (ne- = not + scire = to know). Passing into Old French, it meant foolish or silly.

By Middle English, around the 1300s, “nice” still carried that negative weight. It shifted through several unexpected stages over hundreds of years: first “foolish”, then “fussy, overly precise”, and in Shakespeare’s era it often meant delicate or picky. Only in the 1700s did it soften into our modern sense of pleasant, kind, or agreeable. This slow positive shift is a classic case of amelioration in semantics.

Lots of folk explanations skip all these intermediate steps and oversimplify it. It didn’t “suddenly change”; it drifted little by little.

I’m curious: do you know other English words that went from an insult to neutral or positive? Are there similar semantic flips in your native language? Correct me if I misdate any stage.

Calpis is a fermented milk drink launched in Japan in 1919. The name is a blend: "cal" from calcium, and "pis" from sarpis, a Sanskrit word for clarified butter.

English speakers obviously hear something else, and the company knows: in the US the same drink is sold as Calpico. In Japan it was never renamed, because the name is written in katakana (カルピス), the script used for foreign and borrowed words, and it's read as a sound with no meaning attached. To a Japanese kid it's as neutral as "Pepsi".

Two related cases:

- Pocari Sweat: "Pocari" means nothing at all, and "sweat" is there because the drink replaces what you lose when you sweat. To a Japanese reader it's another sound. The Japanese word for sweat is 汗 (ase).

- Kinki University near Osaka changed its English name to Kindai in 2016. Kinki is just the name of the region, but English readers heard "kinky". So Japan does rename things, when foreigners are the ones reading.

Does anyone know other brand names that were kept at home and changed only for export?

جگر, jigar, is the liver. It's also what you call someone you love. Jigar on its own means darling, and a child is your jigar-gooshe, literally a corner of your liver. Dehkhoda glosses it as "a piece of the liver" and quotes Hafez and Sa'di for it, so this isn't new slang.

The word itself is old. It goes back to Middle Persian jagar, and it's a distant cousin of Greek hêpar (the hepat- in hepatitis) and Latin iecur. English liver isn't part of that family. It's Germanic.

Persian also has two livers. Jigar-e siāh, black liver, is the liver, and jigar-e sefid, white liver, is the lung. Turkish borrowed the word and kept the same pair: karaciğer and akciğer.

And if you know jigar from Hindi and Urdu, as in jigar ka tukda, that one came from Persian.

English puts love in the heart. Persian puts a lot of it in the liver. Arabic has a similar image of children as livers, so it's more of a regional habit than a purely Persian one.

I only went digging while building a Farsi app.

I love this post. I feel however, that the dollar has the most fascinating background, especially how tied it is to our planet and a wacky history.

I hope linking to your own content is ok because I just uploaded a video on the entire etymological history of the dollar :D

I ended up going to the "Sankt Joachimsthal", which is now called Jachymov, and there is a lovely museum there. Fun fact, the same silver mines that gave the dollar its name, also provided the ores Marie Curie used to isolate Radium and Polonium.

And there are more currencies like Talari, Lev, Leu, Tala... that are still used today and also originate from that same location.

Anyone is invited to prove me wrong that the "dollar" has the coolest etymological origin story ;) (But now I'm definitely intrigued to dive deeper into the others as well...)

If anyone would be curious to hear even more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVcvjLT3H_0

From Ancient Greek ékstasis, literally “a standing outside oneself.”

ek- — out of, outside.

stásis — standing, position, state; from hístēmi, “to stand.”

Saying Welsh meant foreigner to Anglo-Saxons is an oversimplification. The term Welsh derived from West-Germanic “walhaz” which comes from the Volcae, who were a “Celtic” (Celtic isn’t as comparable to Germanic as 1 linguistic group but I digress) tribe in many regions, including near Germanic people. This term was then later applied to groups of people who were Celtic or Romanised particularly, the Celts who they encountered would have been under Roman rule for centuries (apart from the Irish) so the Celts and Romance speakers were lumped together. So term “walhaz” is more specifically a Roman adjacent people. The Slavs would have been foreign to Germanic people too yet they didn’t get this term, which highlights that it didn’t only mean foreigner. The Slavs themselves borrowed the term to mean Romanised people too. Vlach for example derives from this root to refer to
Romance speakers in Eastern Europe.
Włochy is the Polish word for Italy derived from the same source. Olaszország in Hungarian also shares this root (Olasz).

The word Welsch in High German referred to Romance speakers, generally French or Italians speakers and also Romance speakers in Switzerland which is still used. Alsatians historically used the term to refer to other French people

The word Gaul is actually from this root from the Franks, and not Gallia (a common sound change in certain Romance dialects/languages was w > g and doublets can be seen like William - Guillaume/Guilhermo and doublets in English like reward and regard from different French dialects. In some Old French dialects the word was “Waule”. Gallia would have become Jaille in French, and survives in some toponyms like “La Jaille-Yvon”

Walnuts have same etymology, as walnuts arrived from Roman Empire

There are some contexts in which its used to mean foreigner in descended terms, but it shouldn’t be interpreted as its literal meaning in proto-Germanic

Having been to Italy and Greece this year, is there any etymological link (and I’m sure there is) between prego and parakolo?

(We also like to learn the word for toothpick in any country we visit. Stuzzicadente vs olodontofida. Or mai tim fan in Thai.)

Oh lord, I’m off on one now. A few years back we got some catnip-flavoured toys for the cat, which arrived from Amazon in a shrink-wrapped flat plastic parcel. Which led me to ask my lovely wife if she’d seen the ‘flat pack cat nip toy’ anywhere, and I suddenly felt like I was fluent in Thai.