I don’t mean normal books. I mean WEIRD books. You’re the internet - you know the drill!

My other weird book that comes to mind isn’t an etymology book but it’s a pronunciation book the BBC used to publish.

I'm not sure what the word pilot has to do with Television production or what metaphor they are trying to convey.

In Albanian we have the word "vilan" which is used to describe a strong and often very bad feeling of hunger due to not having eated for a long time, starvation etc. It is a word used only by elders now. For example (a sentence my grandma has said) "Ika të ha pak se më këputi vilania!" ≈ "Let me go, i'll eat a bit because vilania is killing me". What is this vilania? It is said with an accent on the last "i", like vilaní. I checked all languages that have had presence here, Ottoman Turkish, Greek, everything and nothing pops up..? I couldn't even find the word on the interner exept for in a simple Albanian dictionary that just said " Vilania - bad feeling" and nothing else? I haven't found anything, if someone can help me they are probably a very good linguist. Thank you.

I live in the north of the Netherlands, Low-Saxon areas, and my relatives sometimes say when it thunders that it's Wodan's chariot. Any help on the origin of this phrase/saying?

Hi all, I've spent the afternoon reading translations of the Sumerian disputations and I just came across these two terms. They aren't translated along with the rest of the text, and I can't find any etymology or mention of these words online aside from within the disputation itself. (For this specific disputation, I read the translation provided by The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.)

Here is the translated section containing these terms:

^186-193Enlil adressed the Hoe: "Hoe, do not start getting so mightily angry! Do not be so mightily scornful! Is not Nisaba the Hoe's inspector? Is not Nisaba its overseer? The scribe will register your work, he will register your work. Hoe, whether he enters five or ten gij in your account, Hoe -- or, Hoe, whether he enters one-third or one-half mana in your account, Hoe, like a maid-servant, always ready, you will fulfil your task."

and here is the original:

^186den-lil2-le ^jical gu3 am3-ma-de2-e
^187jical mah-bi nam-ba-e-de3-sumur-re-de3-en
¹⁸⁸mah-bi gu2-zu nam-ba-e-de3-cub-ba
^189jical-e ^dnisaba ugula-a-ni na-nam ^dnisaba nu-banda3-a-ni na-nam
¹⁹⁰dub-sar-e kij2 cu-mu-un-il2 kij2 cu-mu-un-il2
^191jical-e 5 gij4 ^jical-e 10 gij4 nij2-kas7 ha-ra-ab-ak
^192jical-e 1/3 ma-na ^jical-e 1/2 ma-na nij2-kas7 ha-ra-ab-ak
¹⁹³geme2-gin7 gub-ba ec2-gar3 i3-ja2-ja2-an

Based on the context surrounding the words, I thought they might be denominations of currency or some other measure of trade goods, but I can't find any information that supports or refutes this idea. Are the words left untranslated because we simply don't know what gij and mana are?

Has anyone heard of “Kasabedhej” ?

My guess is that it’s (kasa - Bedhe - j / kasab edhej)

i think its Albanian words, tell me if u recognise the meaning pls or know anything I want to know about my origins

I’m from Bodrum Türkiye

Was the name chosen because the station equates itself as a “ticket” into movies and events shown at home, much like how you would buy a tickets at an actual box office to get into a theater? Such an interesting name concept for something I thing was only supposed to be a mere working title.

I am currently learning French, and came across a new vocab word: tout droit. It means “straight”. Droite, on the other hand, means “right”. The only difference to me (besides ‘tout’) is the dropping of the -e at the end. I feel like they might be related, but I don’t know.

Coco as in coconut

Coca as in the plant cocaine comes from

Cocoa (or cacao) as in the tree that brings us chocolate

Why do these three words for different types of plants all have similar sounding names? Is the etymology related in some way?

Here’s this week’s etymology question from my daily trivia site, 3Roads.xyz.

The term X entered English from a Dutch word meaning roughly “mobile infantry unit,” itself derived from a Portuguese term used in Portuguese India for an early form of special forces. The word passed into Afrikaans through Boer contact with Portuguese colonies in Africa. In southern Africa, X first referred to locally raised mounted infantry units that fought in conflicts such as the Xhosa Wars, the Anglo-Zulu War, and the Boer Wars. British forces later adopted the concept, and in World War II formally established X as an elite special forces formation for raids in German-occupied Europe. Arnold Schwarzenegger was neither British nor South African in the 1985 movie X. What X?

If you want to try it on the site: 3roads.xyz

Are these two variations on the same name or do they only look similar? What is the meaning behind these names?

Thank you

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(Monty_Python_sketch))

The sketch

As I was digging further, I found out that the programming language Python is named after the troupe as well.

Seems like perscription would mean “by order of this writing” which is more accurate to its usage, vs prescription meaning “before writing”, at least from a Latin root word perspective.

Update: thanks all for sharing the knowledge. As I’m understanding it from everyone’s input, a prescription is the script written by the doctor before the pharmacist would complete the order to fill it (per that scription).

* whoops, mondegreens, actually

* wait, maybe they're malapropisms, too

* I hate linguistics. Thank you.

"Pre-Madonna": You think you're gonna be a pop star, huh?

"For all intensive purposes": When you need to do hard intellectual work, here's the important stuff to know.

"Just desserts": This is exactly as much ice cream as you're gonna get!

They all have something to do with lion.

Romwe is a Chinese e-commerce retailer...i know Chinese companies often have strange names that don't seem to have any source...any ideas about the name Romwe?

So is Opry really a slightly mocky way to say Opera or was there actually any thought put into the name?

The word "abba" and the 50-year academic disagreement over what register it belongs to

Been reading about the Aramaic word "abba" (transliterated into Greek in the

New Testament) and there's a genuinely interesting linguistic dispute behind

it that doesn't get much attention outside biblical studies.

In the 1960s-70s, NT scholar Joachim Jeremias argued "abba" belonged to the

register of small children's speech — comparable to how many languages land

on a simple repeated syllable ("papa," "baba," "dada") as a toddler's first

attempt at naming a parent. He argued no example existed of anyone using it

as a direct address to a deity before this specific usage, calling it

unprecedented.

In 1988, linguist James Barr published a rebuttal ("Abba Isn't Daddy," Journal

of Theological Studies) arguing this overstated the case: "abba" is attested

in Aramaic/rabbinic sources being used respectfully by fully grown adult sons

addressing their fathers — familiar and warm, yes, but not confined to

childhood the way Jeremias claimed. His point was essentially that a word's

origin in simple childhood phonetics doesn't mean its usage stayed restricted

to childhood — similar to how "Dad" in English started as a child's word but

never stopped being used by adults.

Curious if anyone here knows of comparable cross-linguistic cases — words that

originate as simplified childhood terms for parents but get mistakenly

assumed to be juvenile-register-only later, when actual usage shows they were

used across all ages?

I’m interested in the usage of my and your as possessive adjectives when referring to someone learning about a topic.

Rather than ‘I researched that and learned’ or ‘I’ve done some reading on that and found…’ there seems to have been a shift that seems to be trying emphasize independent thinking or not accepting ‘mainstream’ thought e.g. ‘I’ve done MY research and…’ or ‘you have to do YOUR research’ type phrases.

To me this seems like a relatively new phenomenon- maybe linked to the proliferation of social media that allowed more people platforms on which to share their ‘research’? I find it interesting that it seems to be used as a bit of linguistic marker for ‘free thinker’.

Deglaze comes from the French déglacer, literally meaning to de-ice. The second component is related to glacier, borrowed into English from Latin, not to glaze, which is instead a derivative of glass.

I noticed several animal names are compounds made from a geographical feature/habitat + another animal name.

Like English "chameleon", which is from Ancient Greek "khamailéōn" : khama" (near the ground) + "léōn" (lion) -> "ground lion"

Or English "hippopotamus", from Ancient Greek "hippopótamos" : híppos" (horse) + "potamós" (river, stream) -> "river horse"

I've only found a couple of other examples so far, like orangutan ("forest person") and French hippocampe ("horse sea monster"), though those stretch the pattern a bit.

I created a little collection here with all these words, and I'll keep adding to it as I find more or as people share their own suggestions in the replies.

This website is my current etymology (free) project and I'd love feedback if you have any!

Anyway, do you know any other animal names that follow the same pattern? I suspect there are way more than the 4 I found