My fellow bloggers over at BNET Intercom have revealed some fun facts about National Boss Day (which is today, by the way, lest you forget to buy your boss a box of chocolates or a bottle of the ...

Even if you’re not a full-blown grammar nerd, you’ll find the origins of these words that changed meaning over time completely fascinating The English language is alive—and like any living thing, it ...

The word deadline is in a lot of the news these days - tariff negotiations, ceasefire talks, budget deals. Sports teams face trade deadlines. And, of course, every day, we face personal deadlines to ...

Science historian Howard Markel discusses the origins of the word moon and some of the lore surrounding it, including a 1638 book by the English bishop Francis Godwin entitled The Man in the Moone, ...

Science Diction is a bite-sized podcast about words—and the science stories behind them. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and sign up for our newsletter. Note: This piece has been updated.

It’s always funny how words slip into regular use. “Hello” was a greeting introduced for the invention of the telephone–it was originally meant to be “Ahoy Hoy.” Online language moves so fast that the ...

“Every word was coined by a resourceful individual or borrowed as a result of language contact in a certain place at a certain time,” writes Anatoly Liberman in his new book, “Word Origins and How We ...

Claim: The word handicap comes from 'cap in hand' and refers to the physically disabled's need to subsist as beggars. In 1504, after a brutal war in England, King Henry VII had an idea. King Henry ...

Science Diction is a bite-sized podcast about words—and the science stories behind them. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and sign up for our newsletter. Editor’s Note, March 13, 2019: Since ...

Around 400 B.C., Hippocrates is said to have named masses of cancerous cells karkinos — Greek for crab. Science and medical historian Howard Markel discusses a few hypotheses on why Hippocrates named ...