5 Words for ... Firsts
Now where were we? Ah, yes, the Twitter buyout. Soooo with social media not a particularly nice place to be at the moment, we’ve rejigged...
Haggard Hawks
Obscure words, etymology and language facts
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Pale
(n.) a fence post The ‘pale’ in beyond the pale is a fence post. In that sense, it derives at length from palus, a Latin word for a...
Rubbish
(n.) trash, worthless refuse material; (v.) to criticize severely; to dismiss as or prove to be nonsense For such a throwaway word (no...
Whole
(adj.) entire, complete On the surface, it’s not the most interesting of words, but whole has something of an intriguing story behind it....
Butterworth
(n.) a gesture or movement of the hands used in conversation when a word is forgotten or the speaker loses his train of thought An old...
Beheadal
(n.) the act of removing someone’s head In English, the suffix –al is used to form so-called nouns of action (that is, words essentially...
Astrobleme
(n.) an eroded meteorite impact crater Those enormous rocky scars and hollows caused by meteorites crashing into the surface of the Earth...
Redbreast
(n.) the colourful chest plumage of a robin; the robin itself A favourite festive fact from last year’s HH Twitter feed did the rounds...
–some
(suff.) an English suffix typically used to form adjectives from nouns The –some at the end of awesome comes from an Old English suffix,...
Epenthesis
(n.) the insertion of a sound into a word, often to ease its pronunciation or as an automatic consequence of its phonological context The...
Subject–auxiliary inversion
(n.) the rearrangement of the subject and auxiliary verb of a sentence, often as a means of forming a question With the latest Haggard...
Shirpings
(n.) overgrown plants and grasses on a riverbank or at a lakeside To shirp something is to cut or trim it—while shirpings are the...
Palouser
(n.) an especially beautiful sunset In America’s Pacific Northwest, a winding 160-mile river crosses the border from Idaho and flows into...
Skeuomorph
(n.) a design feature based on or enduring from an earlier design which has become obsolete When was the last time you used a floppy...
Puisne
(adj.) junior, of inferior rank There’s an odd corner of our language where established French phrases are ran together as one unit, and...
Waw
(n.) a wave The waves on the surface of the ocean used to be called waws. So what happened to waws—and where did the waves come in? Well,...
Escalate
(v.) to increase gradually, to grow So here’s an etymological tidbit to undermine everything you thought you knew about everything: the...
Fedora
(n.) a soft-brimmed hat with an indented crown Fedora hats—the favoured style of everyone from Indiana Jones to Hannibal Lecter—take...
Semelfactive
(n., adj.) a verbal aspect denoting a single, unrepeated action When you cough or blink or knock on a door, it is naturally implied that...
Cipher
(n.) one of the sets of three zeroes used to write out numbers like 1,000,000 You might have heard the word cipher being used in...