I was on another thread and got deep into learning about the history of certain words and thought I’d post here. What word history origins / facts do you know?

I’ll start with two that I recently came across:

  • “‘Wer’ (meaning ‘man’) came from Old High German with the Anglo Saxons 1,500 years ago, and was part of Old English. It then became ‘were’ in Middle English and remains as part of werewolf (‘man wolf’) in modern English.” (Source: BillTongg@lemmy.world)

  • “Sculptors in antique Rome could fix mistakes they made by mixing marble dust with wax. If a sculptor was especially gifted and made no mistakes that needed fixing, they would market their art as “sin cera”, which means “without wax”, which is where the word “sincere” comes from.” (Source: Pooptimist@lemmy.world)

  • egrets@lemmy.world
    15·
    19 hours ago

    Happy to see etymology discussion. I used to run r/etymology, suspended it during the API debacle as part of the blackout, and got replaced by Reddit and banned by the new mod.

    The “were” in “werewolf” also gives us “world” (originally referring to humanity, as in “the epoch of mankind”) and also came through Latin, giving us, among other things, “virtue” (as in, the measure of a man, I think), and “virile”.