Archive for Etymology

hidalgo

I’ve encountered the term hidalgo in various contexts; it refers to Spanish or Portuguese nobility. The thing that surprised me about that term is the etymology: it’s from Old Spanish fijo dalgo, literally meaning “son of something.” Wikipedia suggests: In the Spanish language of that period, in the phrase Hijo de algo, the word algo […]

piggy bank

If you search the web to determine the etymology of the phrase piggy bank, you'll quickly conclude that there is little disagreement over its origin. Many web pages give the...

muggy

Mary Anne noted in passing recently that it was muggy in Chicago, and I realized that though I've known the word all my life, I didn't know where it came...

boson

I've known the word boson for years, but I don't think I knew until recently that it's named after Indian physicist Satyendranath Bose (also written “Satyendra Nath Bose”), as in...

warfarin

I've known for a while that there's an anticoagulant named warfarin, but it never occurred to me to look up its etymology; I always just assumed it had something to...