“Every word was coined by a resourceful individual or borrowed as a result of language contact in a certain place at a certain time,” writes Anatoly Liberman in his new book, “Word Origins and How We ...

Quarantine is a word that has become all too familiar in recent years, but its origins are centuries old. Stemming from the ...

One of my college history professors once claimed that the reason there is no English word that rhymes with orange is that it is one of the few words derived from Persian. He was only partly right; ...

At its most basic, dude just means a guy or a person (“that dude over there”). But dude is one of the most versatile words in ...

This week, people around the world will be opening heart-shaped boxes with “the food of the gods” nestled in crepe paper inside. But it took a lot of scientific and anthropological work to unearth the ...

Science Diction is a bite-sized podcast about words—and the science stories behind them. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and sign up for our newsletter. Things aren’t off to a great start ...

This story originally appeared on Mental Floss. Every two years we get to marvel at them — no, not the superhuman feats of strength and skill from the greatest athletes in the world, but the weird and ...

The word deadline is in a lot of the news these days - tariff negotiations, ceasefire talks, budget deals. Sports teams face trade deadlines. And, of course, every day, we face personal deadlines to ...