The Spanish word candado, or “padlock,” comes from Latin catenatus, meaning “chained,” also the source of the English word concatenation, which means “a series of things,” or literally “links in a chain...
Celia, from Spokane, Washington, is unhappy that fewer and fewer English speakers seem aware of the correct plurals of Latin and Greek words. She is bothered, for example, when someone refers to minimums rather than minima. Minima is more often a...
Chris in Ithaca, New York, contends that English needs a word that packs the same punch as the Spanish word vergüenza, usually translated as “shame,” but conveying more than that. Vergüenza derives from Latin verecundia, which specifies...
In anatomical nomenclature, a bursa is a fluid-filled sac that helps cushion a joint. Bursa is the Latin word for “purse,” the source of English purse itself, as well as the bursar who controls the purse strings in a college, plus...
Mary in Alexandria, Virginia, wonders when words like senior and senior citizen came to mean “elderly.” Senior comes from Latin senex, “old,” the source also of Senate and senile. In the 1930s, a politician helped popularize...
Quinn from Excelsior, Minnesota, is five years old — well, five and three-quarters, as she points out. She wonders why the letter Q is so often followed by U. In Old English, the alphabet didn’t include the letter Q. The word quick, for...