Published on 12, July, 2020
Did you know that the word for the colour orange comes from the fruit, not the other way round? https://www.omniglot.com/bloggle/?p=14856Our name for the fruit comes from the Sanskrit for the name of the tree. Other languages name the fruit after the Portuguese who traded it, or after the Chinese who first cultivated it.
I love etymology!!! Did you know that the word blue (which was often one of the last colours to be named in a language as often there were just words for different shades of green, and many languages now have multiple words for different shades of blue) has various origins - in English it comes from the Old High German word for bright and the previous word was azure (which many (Romance) languages still use) which came from the old name for the stone lapis lazuli.
Also, the word petrichor meaning the smell of dust after rain is quite a recent word, chosen during a research paper by students who wanted a word to describe that phenomenon. Petri means stone and ichor means the blood of the gods which is a really strange literal meaning of the word petrichor in my opinion, but cool nonetheless!
I love etymology too. When I was in year six our class teacher suggested we get the Chambers Etymological English Dictionary. Sixty years later it is still on my study shelf, and still a source of fascination.
Our year six teacher was eccentric, possibly neurodivergent. On Friday afternoons he would write the clues for the Telegraph crossword on the blackboard, and we had to complete it using whatever reference material we had to hand - no Goolgle in the 'sixties. The winner got a shilling in old money - that was worth two Mars bars, so there was quite a competition.