A San Diego woman says her mother always tucked her into bed with the comforting wish, “Sweet dreams, and rest in the arms of Morpheus.” This allusion to mythology evokes a time when people were more familiar with Greek myth, and the...
The words plethora and drastic both have roots in ancient Greek. Both were first used in English as medical terms, plethora indicating “an excess of bodily fluid” and drastic meaning “having an effect.” This is part of a...
A sixth-grade teacher in San Antonio, Texas, is skeptical about a story that gringo derives from a song lyric. He’s right. The most likely source of this word is the Spanish word for “Greek,” griego, a term applied to foreigners...
Looking for a word that denotes being really excited for someone, but also a little sad? One option is bittersweet, but if you’d like a term that’s not quite so overused, yayboo is taking hold online. The Modern Greek word charmolype...
Martha went on an overnight backpacking trip and came back with a new word: triboluminescence, which refers to the glow created by rubbing together two pieces of quartz. The tribo- is from a Greek root meaning “to rub,” the source also...
There’s a reason why we have both capital and lowercase letters. As the alphabet went from the Phoenicians to the Greeks to the Romans, letters took on new sounds, and the need to write quickly brought about the introduction of lowercase...