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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.
Some statistics: the newsletter currently goes out to 36,000 subscribers by email, plus more through RSS, Twitter and Facebook. The site contains more than 2,700 pages, accumulated over 17 years, and on average reaches 77,000 unique visitors a week, who between them make 550,000 page views.
New this week
Manicule Not to be confused with manacle or manicure, this is a much rarer word that also derives from Latin manus for a hand, in this case from the diminutive manicula, a little hand, which Romans also used ...
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Old besom I can assure you that old besom is a well-recorded insult that goes back many years, commonly with added expletives: “I’m a freeholder, with money in the bank; and now I won’t trust women no more! ...
[Read the whole piece] Updated this week
Monkey’s uncle What it means is nothing very profound. It’s just an exclamation of surprise: “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” It has been assumed to be a reference to Darwin’s Origin of Species of 1859 ...
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Shaggy-dog story By a shaggy-dog story we commonly mean a hugely embellished, often rambling tale that ends either in a deflating anticlimax or with an atrocious pun. The term and the genre are widely known but ...
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Randomly chosen
Bill It goes back to the term Old Bill, which has been around since the First World
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.
Some statistics: the newsletter currently goes out to 36,000 subscribers by email, plus more through RSS, Twitter and Facebook. The site contains more than 2,700 pages, accumulated over 17 years, and on average reaches 77,000 unique visitors a week, who between them make 550,000 page views.
New this week
Manicule Not to be confused with manacle or manicure, this is a much rarer word that also derives from Latin manus for a hand, in this case from the diminutive manicula, a little hand, which Romans also used ...
[Read the whole piece]
Old besom I can assure you that old besom is a well-recorded insult that goes back many years, commonly with added expletives: “I’m a freeholder, with money in the bank; and now I won’t trust women no more! ...
[Read the whole piece] Updated this week
Monkey’s uncle What it means is nothing very profound. It’s just an exclamation of surprise: “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” It has been assumed to be a reference to Darwin’s Origin of Species of 1859 ...
[Read the whole piece]
Shaggy-dog story By a shaggy-dog story we commonly mean a hugely embellished, often rambling tale that ends either in a deflating anticlimax or with an atrocious pun. The term and the genre are widely known but ...
[Read the whole piece]
Randomly chosen
Bill It goes back to the term Old Bill, which has been around since the First World