Tanya, calling from Xiamen, China, and originally from Marshall, Michigan, asks about dilly-dally, a phrase that surprised her coming from her 24-year-old brother. Dilly-dally is a reduplicated form of dally, from Anglo-French dalier, meaning “to...
Justin in Dallas, Texas, is curious about the origin of the name William, and why the Spanish version is Guillermo. Its popularity goes back to the days of William the Conqueror. Modern languages have several versions of this name, such as German...
John Chaneski’s quiz adapts the National Puzzlers League puzzle type called a flat: a short verse with one or more blanks, an enumeration, and a stated bit of wordplay that turns one answer into another. These two-line flats use The Wizard of Oz...
What does a piggyback ride have to do with pigs? Not much. In the 16th century, the word was pickaback, meaning to pitch or throw on one’s back. It’s had dozens of spellings over the past few centuries, but perhaps the word piggy has...
Many of the world’s languages apparently derived from a prehistoric common ancestor known as Indo-European. But since no one ever wrote down a word of it, how do we know what it was like?