As it’s Queen Elizabeth’s birthday we take a look at the etymology behind the word nonagenarian

Nonagenarian Queen Elizabeth has just entered the ranks of the nonagenarians – people aged between ninety and ninety-nine. ‘Nonagenarian’ is one of a set of words that are used to describe people in a particular decade of life: you can also be a quadragenarian (forties), quinquagenarian (fifties), sexagenarian (sixties),… Read More

Dog chipping, living wage, and superdelegate: We take a look back at March’s Words in the News

The best thing I can say about dog chipping is that It’s not what I initially thought it was. It refers to the process of planting a sterile microchip containing identifying details under your pet dog’s skin: a digital-age improvement over the traditional metal collar tag. Also called microchipping, the… Read More

Lucy Mangan on the your latest word submissions

Well, goodness me, what have we here? First, from new contributor patrick_gooch comes “amalgamerge”, a kind of tautologous portmanteau (tautomanteau? LET’S MAKE IT HAPPEN, PEOPLE) apparently meaning “to amalgamate slowly and stealthily”, though I’m not quite sure where the slowness – etymologically speaking – comes from. And then,… Read More

Shakespeare the Phrasemaker

Shakespeare the Phrasemaker It has been said that Shakespeare’s greatest gift was as a creator of memorable phrases. Many of these have a striking resonance that makes them attractive to modern writers as titles for films, books, and songs. Here are a few examples of Shakespearean phrases that continue to… Read More

Etymology Corner – Shakespeare the Wordmaker

Shakespeare the Wordmaker It is a remarkable fact that the works of William Shakespeare include more 2000 words that are not recorded in any earlier author. It is likely that some of these words were not actually invented by Shakespeare, but had been used earlier in spoken language or by… Read More

Lucy Mangan takes a look at your recent word submissions before Easter hits

How have we left it this far into the American president-picking process to enjoy the fact that the archaic English word “trumpery” means “nonsense; something without use or value”, “showy and worthless” or any combination of the above. The only way it could be improved would be if someone went… Read More

It’s World Book Day and Lucy Mangan looks at some really ‘conooper’ word submissions from Moville Community College

In celebration of World Book Day we have a special delivery today, from the students at Moville Community College in Donegal. Kay Ward and her students were looking at poetic techniques in class and talking about why poets use certain words instead of others and even sometimes make them up. Read More

‘Project Fear’, ‘Feel the Bern’, and ‘Titan Secondaries’: February’s Words in the News

If I told you about a forthcoming referendum on whether a certain country should remain in a certain political union, and that the campaign to leave this union had branded the campaign to stay in Project Fear, you’d probably assume I was talking about Scotland in 2014. But in… Read More

What’s all the snoise about? Lucy Mangan looks at some of your recent word submissions

Forgive me if I am not quite myself at the moment. I am heavily involved in a friend’s ‘wedmin’. She introduced me to the word and consequently the plethora of miseries it covers. It’s short for ‘wedding administration’, regarding which there are no other abbreviations, short cuts, abridgement, truncations, condensations,… Read More