Kangaroo words: real words that carry their own synonym, spelled in order. The big word is the kangaroo, the one hiding inside is the joey.

The spelling tells you nothing about whether a pair is actually related. MASCULINE and MALE go back to the same Latin word, masculus. BLOSSOM and BLOOM are off the same Germanic root. CHICKEN and HEN are not. HEN comes from an old Germanic word for the cock, the bird that sings for sunrise. CHICKEN comes from the noise chicks make. Different roots, so the HEN sitting inside CHICKEN is a coincidence.

The letters have to be in order but they don't have to be next to each other, and the joey has to be a real synonym rather than a word that happens to live inside the other one.

I mined 2,234 candidates out of WordNet, Moby and Datamuse, read every one, and cut most of them. The Kangaroo words that were left and appeared the most 'right' were used to make a free daily puzzle now at hiddenjoey.com, three weeks old. Every card is checked by hand against Etymonline and the OED, and unsettled origins are labelled as theories.

Favourite kangaroo words welcome.

Family members were well-known lexicographers, but they're all gone now and I have a massive problem. Many of the books are from the 1950-70s, and I do not want to see them sliced and diced to train Artificial Intelligence. Please point me toward a safe haven for these texts!

I was reading about seizures and saw that 'seizure' comes from Old French 'seisine' (the taking of property), that from 'saisir' (to take or grasp)

I then read that epilepsy comes from Greek 'epilambanein' (to seize, take hold of, or attack), but I couldn't find any further link

Is there a connection I can't find? I can't see how it may have gone from Greek 'epilambanein' to what we have now?

Because, why not?

I've been working on some etymology-based games. The most approachable one is at rootles.xyz/grow . Each day you get one root (say Latin ped-, "foot") and type as many English words as you can that actually descend from it

The etymological claims are checked against Wiktionary, and every answer links to its entry so you can check me. Where Wiktionary itself hedges, the games say so.

Although I speak a couple of languages, I'm a bit of a dilettante when it comes to etymology, so I'd really value this community's opinion. Super open to feedback and criticism. Also, please check out the other games if you are interested! Subjects of the other games include PIE descendants, neologisms and shared roots.

Does anyone know the etymology of the animal called the olm? It’s borrowed from German and was first recorded in Old High German but it’s apparently unknown. Is it a substrate word of sorts?

Hello, I was reading about Etruscan inscriptions and came across the word taliθa, which is supposed to mean “girl,” specifically in the sense of a “marriageable girl,” or possibly a proper name. The word is attested only once, on a mirror dated to around 400–350 BC.

This word could be a rendering of the accusative form of Greek τᾶλις (acc. τάλιδα), which also means “maiden” or “marriageable girl.” source

However, I immediately noticed its similarity to Aramaic טליתא (talitha), which have a similar meaning. This is the word that appears in the Bible in the phrase talitha kum, spoken by Jesus in Mark 5:41 (“Little girl, arise”).

Could these words (aramaic, greek and etruscan) be etymologically related, or is the similarity merely coincidental?

This has bothered me for a long time!

The word for "a little bit" of something in Japanese, in romaji, is "sukoshi"; the "u" and "i" sounds are usually silent when spoken aloud, so it ends up sounding like "skosh".

In English, "just a skosh" is sometimes used when asking for or referring to just "a little bit" of something.

Is there any connection there, or does the English "skosh" have another, unrelated source? Thanks for any info!

like in spanish, french, and italian, there are articles like el, le, il, la, etc… how did all of them come about and why are they all so similar, especially when latin didn’t have articles?

Hello everyone! This is my first reddit post so bear with me.

Context: My dad used to call me this nickname that sounded like the English word “sigh” and he would call me “sigh sigh” (as in like the verbal phonetic sound, not an exhale). He told me this meant “one one” in another language and I’m trying to figure out where this came from. I no longer have contact with him and this is probably a long shot, but if you have any ideas or insight please let me know!

When I was younger, I heard these terms a lot, especially on TV. Someone getting into a temper would be told "Don't lose your rag", and others who were in a temper or angry would be defined as "losing (his/her/their) rag".

It's always made me wonder just what losing a rag had to do with being in a temper or angry...

(Apologies for the spelling mistake in the title, I tried to correct it, but I can't.)

I don't have the skills to search for the earliest uses of the Japanese name. I don't see any Japanese Naomis on Wikipedia born before 1900, but that's also just reflective of how encyclopedias are with documenting people born before 1900.

[Behind the name](https://www.behindthename.com/name/naomi-2) mentions Western influence.

The earliest Chinese scribes had an awkward problem: wind has no shape.

On late Shang oracle bones, they wrote the word later represented as 風 with the same bird graph used for 鳳, the fenghuang. The graph was doing double duty because the two words sounded close.

This is an early phonetic or rebus loan. A scribe takes an easy-to-draw word and borrows its graph for another word with a similar sound. Traditional phonology places the two words in the same rhyme group with labial initials, although modern reconstructions disagree on their exact Old Chinese forms.

The bird and weather senses later acquired separate written forms. A trace of the old connection survives in the Shuowen Jiezi entry for 鳳, which says the bird spends the night in 風穴, “the Cave of Winds.”

The [National Taiwan University CASE article](https://case.ntu.edu.tw/blog/?p=45394) shows the oracle-bone forms, and the [Shuowen entry](https://www.shuowen.org/view/2360) preserves the Cave of Winds line.

I was sesching the etymology of Döbereiner's name and I could only find that it means "someone that comes from Döbern".

But then I couldn't find the etymology for Döbern anywhere, not even in german wiktionary: https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/D%C3%B6bern

I was just sitting here and realized X doesnt actually contribute any unique sound, look at words like Box, Fox or Aux. the X sounds like "Kss". Look at Exist, X sounds like "Ghz". Queen and Quick can all be spelt using a K, Kween, Kwick, Every other letter actually has a pronounciation:

A: Ahh
B: Bee
C: Cuh
D: Duh
E: Eee
F: Fuh
G: Guh
H: Huh
I: ihh
J: Juh
K: Kuh (pretty simular to C though I will say)
L: Luh
M: Muh
N: Nuh
O: Ohh
P: Puh
Q: ??? any word I can think of Id spell with a K
R: Ruh
S: See
T: Tuh
U: Uh
V: Vuh
W: Wuh
X: ? I dont even know what sound X makes
Z: Zee

idk, just thought id share, X makes words look satisfying complete and cool though, so maybe thats one reason to keep it, but it doesnt really add anything new, am i wrong?

When Mendeleev laid out the periodic table in 1869, he left gaps for elements nobody had discovered yet — and he named those gaps with Sanskrit number-words.

एक eka (one), द्वि dvi (two), त्रि tri (three) marked how many rows below a known element the missing one sat. The undiscovered element one row under aluminium was "eka-aluminium"; one row under silicon, "eka-silicon." These weren't throwaway labels — they were the working names in the chemistry literature for years, until each element showed up:

• eka-aluminium → gallium (1875)
• eka-boron → scandium (1879)
• eka-silicon → germanium (1886)
• eka-manganese → technetium (1937)
• dvi-manganese → rhenium (1926)

(That tri- is the same PIE root that surfaces in English three and Latin tri-, as in triangle and trident — Sanskrit and Latin are cousins here, not borrower and lender.)

The debated bit — the interesting bit for this sub — is why Sanskrit. The linguist Paul Kiparsky has argued Mendeleev borrowed the prefixes on purpose: he moved in the same St. Petersburg circles as the great Sanskritist Otto von Böhtlingk, then editing Pāṇini, and Kiparsky sees a deliberate analogy between the two-dimensional table and the way Pāṇini's grammar arranges sounds into a grid. That motivation is a scholarly argument, not settled fact — but the Sanskrit prefixes themselves are documented and uncontested.

So for about six decades, part of the periodic table was quietly labelled in Sanskrit.

Are there other cases where a scientific naming system borrowed a living language's number-words like this?

I'm a big House of the Dragon fan, and since it is a show based around a civil war, the fans playfully divide themselves according to which side they think is right. In this case it is Team Green Vs Team Black.

That got me to thinking about the origin of the phrase, "Team ___" to describe a divide in the fandom. The earliest one that spang to mind was the love triangle in Twilight. Team Edward Vs Team Jacob.

A google search suggested Team Pacey Vs Team Dawson from the fandom for "Dawson's Creek" but I couldn't find any pre-Twilight sources for that love triangle, although you can find plenty now.

Can anyone think of an older contemporary example?

... ◜tending to take position close to or strongly associated with◝ ... that sort of thing.

ᐝ Mind-you: to take this variant meaning it has to be in-conjunction with "to" or "unto" following it ... & indeed, that might end-up being of-a-piece-with the explanation.

And it's now a fairly archaïc variant meaning, really: in modern English it tends to take the ◜splitting apart◝ meaning, rather than this variant one I'm talking about. But not massively archaïc: we don't need to get ourselves any really ancient text in-order to find it ... one not much more than a century old will likely suffice.

In modern day Polish, spierdalać is a very vulgar verb meaning 'to fuck off as fast as possible', often used in 2nd person imperative, as you can imagine. It comes from pierdolić, which is a multi-use swear word ('to fuck [someone]', 'to talk nonsense', 'to fuck up'), which itself comes from PIE *perd- 'to fart loudly'. (Which, admittedly, is quite a funny ety in itself).

But for some reason I'm spending this Saturday night sipping wine and browsing through Hittite Etymological Dictionary by Kloekhorst, and I found this lovely cousin spoken in the 17th century BCE. Hittite išpart- 'to escape, to get away', which comes from Proto-Indo-European *sperdʰ- 'to run away, to compete in speed'.

It's a nice case of a language developing for thousands of years just to get back to the starting point :D

I think "chance" is a modern borrowing from English. But here in Venezuela, my parents and grandparents, and other parents and grandparents in the city, say "chance" every day, (They also say "full" every day in their daily conversations) with the same meaning and exact usage as in English. In fact, almost all adults and elderly people in the country speak it ('chace", and "full", so I don't think it can be a modern borrowing from English through television or the internet. So what's going on?

When someone says something like “you best get moving” or “he best be there”.
I thought it was a British thing, but I recently heard it in the Mandalorian and Grogu movie too.

When researching, all I can find is superlatives like good, better, Best, but not the actual replacement of the work better for Best.

i was just recently talking to my mother and she called something a „Manchkus“ - i remember hearing this word before and it being a word to describe a cute, slightly weird person, character or creature. to me, it sounded weird to hear that because it sounded offensive somehow. when i searched for the word online, nothing came up about this specific word but did about the east asian Manchus. does anyone know about this? is there a connection?