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where from. source area. where everything started. zero of. originating site. place of extraction. source spot. from station. graph crossing y-axis.
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where from. source area. where everything started. zero of....
- Area of Origin
28 other terms for area of origin- words and phrases with...
- Home Place
Another way to say Home Place? Synonyms for Home Place...
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Tremendous thanks and appreciation to all of you. The online etymology dictionary (etymonline) is the internet's go-to source for quick and reliable accounts of the origin and history of English words, phrases, and idioms. It is professional enough to satisfy academic standards, but accessible enough to be used by anyone.
- Vaccine
- Clue
- Cop Out
- Shampoo
- Nightlife
- Chortle
- Pandemonium
- Robot
- Factoid
- Fact
The word vaccine derives indirectly from the Latin for cow, vacca. The story goes that, just before the turn of the 19th century, a British doctor named Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, or variolae vaccinae, were much less likely to contract smallpox, which could otherwise devastate entire communities. Jenner decided...
The word clue is a variant of clew, meaning a “ball of thread or yarn,” according to Merriam-Webster. It comes to us from Middle and Old English, and the ball of yarn in question is a handy method for finding your way out of a labyrinth, as Greek mythology’s Theseus did after killing the Minotaur.
Louis Joseph Vance’s 1910 novel The Fortune Hunter includes the following line: “He simply can’t lose, can’t fail to cop out the best-looking girl with the biggest bank-roll in town.” In that context, cop means something like get or grab—a usage that survives today in a phase like “cop a feel,” and which may have roots in the Latin capere—“to take”...
If you’ve ever gotten the tingles while getting your hair washed at a salon, the origin of the word shampoo will make sense to you. It comes from a conjugation of the Hindi verb campna or champna, meaning “to press or knead muscles.” A 1762 account from an officer of the East India Company abroad describes the process of being shampooed, which was ...
The term nightlife doesn’t require a ton of explanation—it’s life that happens at night—but it is kinda neat to realize that the word’s first known appearance in English was in Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Melville describeshis character, Pierre, looking for a cab late at night. He turns off a side street and “find[s] himself sudd...
Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” has a character chortle in joy. It seems Carroll combined the words chuckling and snortingto build a new, intuitively understood verb.
John Milton constructed the word pandemonium out of the Greek root Pan-, or “all,” and daemonium, from the Latin for “evil spirit.” The pandemonium in Paradise Lost was a “place for all the demons,” which makes sense as a name for what was basically the capital city of hell. It was the opposite of a pantheon, or place for all of the gods. Pandemoni...
A writer is also responsible for the word robot, but in this case the word was coined not in an epic poem but in a play. In Karel Čapek’s 1920 hit RUR, or “Rossum’s Universal Robots” in translation, Capek needed a word for the mechanical beings who go on to world domination in his story. After originally toying with the idea of using the Latin labo...
Today, factoid is often used to mean a short, somewhat trivial fact—the kind of thing a website devoted to curiosity and fun facts often shares. When Norman Mailer coined the term, though, he explained it as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper … not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent...
If you’re interested in just the facts, you may want to know that the word fact comes to us from a verb meaning “to do.” The past participle of the Latin verb facere is factus , meaning “done.” As a noun that becomes factum, or “an event, occurrence, deed, achievement.” The modern meaning of fact, something known to be true, implicitly contrasts th...
- Jon Mayer
The meaning of POINT OF ORIGIN is the place where something comes from : the place where something originates. How to use point of origin in a sentence.
areas of origin. as a point of departure. as a springboard. as a starting point. at origin. cause of the fire. countries of origin. country of origin. departure location.
Example 1. The etymology of the word ‘etymology’ is complex, as follows: ethimolegia “facts of the origin and development of a word,”. from Old French etimologie, ethimologie (14c., Modern French étymologie) from Greek etymologia “analysis of a word to find its true origin,” properly “study of the true sense (of a word)”.
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What do etymologies mean?
Jul 3, 2019 · The word etymology is derived from the Greek word etymon, which means "the true sense of a word." But in fact the original meaning of a word is often different from its contemporary definition. The meanings of many words have changed over time, and older senses of a word may grow uncommon or disappear entirely from everyday use.
