Maggie from Washington, D.C., heard a college friend from Eastern North Carolina and later a veterinarian referring to the panting of a dog as hassling. In the 19th century, the verb hussle was used in Southeast England to mean “wheeze or breathe...
In 1803, a shy British pharmacist wrote a pamphlet that made him a reluctant celebrity. The reason? He proposed a revolutionary new system for classifying clouds — with Latin names we still use today, like cumulus, cirrus, and stratus. Also: when...
Kate from Arlington, Massachusetts, and her boyfriend disagree about how to pronounce biopic. The confusion arises in part because the -opic at the end looks like the ends of words like myopic and microscopic. It’s actually a shortening of the...
The word piecemeal means bit by bit. If you pay back a debt piecemeal, you repay it a little at a time. The -meal in piecemeal is an old term that means a measure of time or a specified portion. In Middle English, this element appears in several...
Cara in San Diego, California, wonders why English has monologue and dialogue, but unicycle and bicycle rather than monocycle and dicycle. The dia- in dialogue means “through,” as in diagonal and diameter, not “two,” and duologue is the term for a...
Some 50 years ago, says Susan from Burbank, California, she and a friend made up a game involving prefixes and suffixes, which led to such nonsense words as epidormithry and postpreparize. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...