Inkhorn terms are showy Latin- and Greek-based words stuffed into English, a label that looks back to the animal-horn ink bottles used by 14th-century scribes. Henry Cockeram’s 1623 The English Dictionarie (Amazon) includes catillate, meaning “to...
Scott in Billings, Montana, wonders about the word hornswoggle, meaning to swindle, bamboozle, deceive, or trick. This verb found its way into American English during the 1820’s, when there was a fad among newspaper editors and writers for inventing...
It seems there’s a sesquipedalian version to the classic “Three Blind Mice” folk rhyme about a trio of rodents with impaired vision. Need a visual yourself? Try this one. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
If you say to someone the Spanish equivalent of “you’re giving me green gray hairs” (me sacas canas verdes), it means that person is making you angry. In Japan, the phrase that literally translates as “one red dot”...
A fan of the TV series West Wing was puzzled by a character’s use of the term pulchritude. It’s a pretty ugly term for a word that means “beauty.” Check out what some other commenters are saying about the word. This is part...
Is there a word in the English language that means “to read by candlelight”? A listener in Kittery Point, Maine, used to read the dictionary every night as a teenager and came across such a word. She’s been racking her brain to...