The director of Common Voices Chorus, a women’s choir in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, seeks a word to denote what her group does when they get together to sing simply for the joy of singing and community-building, rather than working toward the goal of performing for an audience in the future. It’s not exactly a rehearsal, so what should they call it? Some words in English have melodious roots in ancient languages that aren’t obvious, but don’t quite fit the bill either. Symphony comes from Greek words that mean “voices together” and Latin cantare, “to sing,” gave rise to English enchantment, and accent, which refers to “song added to speech.” This is part of a complete episode.
Two words from the 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee prep materials: avahi, a term for a woolly lemur of Madagascar, and saltigrade, which describes spiders and other creatures that have feet and limbs adapted for leaping. Saltigrade is...
Louie from Black Hills, South Dakota, recalls the time his girlfriend fell off a paddleboard and into a lake, at which point his father declared She bit the farm! This peculiar locution is most likely his dad’s own combination of two...
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