WORLD WIDE WORDS
New this week
Rotate versus revolve That’s an interesting question, which lacks a simple answer. If anybody’s not sure about a lazy Susan, by the way, it’s a device on a table which turns to give easy access to plates and condiments. Most people’s ...
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Spill the beans The key word is indeed spill, which has always had a negative aura about it. In Old English it meant to kill and in the twelfth century to shed blood (which is why we still have the fixed phrase to spill blood). By the fourteenth ...
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Palpebrous My secret is out. I admit it. I am palpebrous. However, my confession will mean nothing unless I explain the word, because it won’t be understood even by that minuscule proportion of the population who know the Latin from which ...
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Randomly chosen
Chock-a-block Chock-a-block is actually a fairly widely known North American term, I’m told. I know it well and would use it, though there’s a faint air of being slightly out of date about it. In Britain, it’s now common to hear the ...
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The next website update
The next update to this site is due on 1 June. You should then able to read about the hedonometer, learn the story behind adoxography and discover the origin of the wrong end of the stick. If you had subscribed to my newsletter, you would already have seen them, and more besides.
Recently added pages
Banausic; Austerian; Earl Grey tea; Hoyden; Theranostics; Piggy bank; Umpty; Carbon bubble; Career versus careen; Facinorous; Ignoramus; Profician; Cooking one's goose; Allision; Scrumptious; Pull devil, pull baker; Thatcher's linguistic legacy; Fib; Vulcan; Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater; Fender; Predictive policing; Catchpole; De-extinction; Asynartesia; Nous; Swanning around; Solutionism; Landing; Sitting bodkin; Betwixt; Crowdworking; Toffee-nosed; Hate-watching; Refocillate.
About World Wide Words
The English language is forever changing. New words appear; old ones fall out of use or change their meanings. World Wide Words tries to record at least some part of this shifting wordscape by featuring new words, word histories, the background to words in the news, and the curiosities of native English speech.
This site is the archive of pieces that have appeared in the free newsletter. Weekly issues include much more than appears here, including discussion by readers, serendipitous encounters with unfamiliar language, and tongue-in-cheek tut-tuttings at errors perpetrated by sloppy writers.
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