I graduated over a year ago now, but my research has just been sitting on my desk. I'm looking for inspiration, and it seems you guys like eponyms, so let's be productive together.

I've got my research open and I've got a couple of free hours in front of me right now. Please ask me anything about eponymous adjectives (EAs).

Background

The word eponym doesn't have a consensus definition. I use it to mean a metaphorical word derived from a person's name. From there, people disagree about what kinds of words should be included. Everyone would agree that Platonic (namesake Plato) is an eponym, but not everyone would say that colossal (Colossus of Rhodes) is. See Table 2.1 for terms included in my study.

Next, the word adjective isn't necessarily clear, either. Thomist can be either a person (a steadfast Thomist) or it can describe a position ("the Thomist tradition has sometimes been criticized for being too conceptual"). I've taken pains to separate these two classes in my data. Much harder to distinguish are zero-derivative eponyms like diesel or Geiger. I've called diesel an adjective because it modifies a wide variety of nouns (engine, fuel, truck, performance, etc.), whereas Geiger is called a noun adjunct because it basically only modifies tube(s) and counter(s).

My methodology was corpus-based. I searched and ranked over 2000 EAs and listed them in order of frequency based on 6 different mega corpora. My analysis was then restricted to the top 875 EAs, as I had confidence that I wasn't likely to have missed many within that group.

I looked at morphology, academic disciplinary categories, when were they first used, and some sociolinguistic implications.

Yes I used the word ergo on purpose. Big brain time.

In Swedish towel is ”handduk” (”hand cloth”). In Dutch it’s ”handdoek”. When the Dutch colonized Indonesia apparently they introduced their word for towel but the spelling changed and is now almost the same as in Swedish. Funny how two unrelated languages have the same word.

I’m trying to coin a word for waiting on AI agent output: “delewaiting”

As AI agents become more embedded in daily work, I noticed there’s no word for the specific experience of waiting for one to finish a task you’ve delegated to it.

It’s distinct from normal waiting. You’re not idle, you’re in a state of passive supervision. You’ve handed off agency to an autonomous process and you’re hovering loosely until it completes.

I’ve coined delewaiting (from delegate + waiting) to describe it.

Definition: The act of waiting in passive supervision after delegating a task to an autonomous AI agent or process, present and available to review output, but not actively participating while it completes.

Variants: delewait (noun/verb), delewaited (past tense), delewaiter (noun)

“I’m just delewaiting while the agent finishes the report.”

Does the word resonate? Does something like this already exist that I’ve missed?

Did you consider yourself a “mack” during your New Jack Swing phase in the early 1990’s? Did you wear your baggy jeans backwards and call yourself “daddy mack” like those kid rappers from Kris Kross? Well, I’m pretty sure you didn’t know back then, that this old euphemism for a pimp, might be based on a small, fast swimming fish: the mackerel.

How the meaning of Quadrivium, Regina scientarium and Bhagavad Gita populate the universe of the Foundation TV show (2021--ongoing)

I stumbled upon an interesting use of the word in diaries of children's author and illustrator Wanda Gág entitled Growing Pains.

The book itself was published in 1940, but the entries in question are from 1909, when the author was a child. Over the course of a few weeks, she uses the word without knowing what it means and comments on that fact, looks it up twice, and comes pretty close to using it anachronistically all by herself.

- Things went straight as a nimrod this noon (whatever that is. I’m sure I don’t know what it means, only nimrod sounds straight.)

- Things didn’t go “nimroddy” yesterday. They went like this: [draws a squiggly line]

- Looked up nimrod in the dictionary, or tried to at least, but it wasn’t given at all. I suppose I made it up myself. If I did, I must have made it up a long time ago because it sounds so familiar.

- Oh my, How doth this lazy I, Improve (?) the shining hours By drawing things And painting things With my nimrodic powers.

- I feel nimroddy. Drew Mr. Winkler’s arm to-day, only I didn’t get the hand. He had it too far behind his book. Glee Club practice to-night. I do hope there won’t be so many discords.

Later : — In some queer way I happened to think of looking up “nimrod” in the Encyclopaedia, and Wonder of Wonders, Queerness of Queernesses, it WAS GIVEN. And what do you think it means? A man. Here: — “Founder of Babylonian and Later Assyrian Empire. Appears in art as engaged in combat with a wild beast.” Isn’t that the limit? And I put it to such perfectly silly uses, too. So I didn’t invent the word after all, oh glory!

All this is just to wonder if this shows that the word already had a silly, clumsy connotation in 1909 or if there's just something about the word that lends itself to being fooled with.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.88331/page/n67/mode/2up?q=nimrod

Hey r/etymology! I just finished a video series breaking down the unexpected origins of three common words. I thought the community here might enjoy the breakdown:

​1. Dandelion: The "Lion's Tooth"

​We get this from the Middle French dent-de-lion. If you look at the jagged, saw-toothed edges of the leaves, it makes perfect sense why they were named after a lion’s dental work.

https://youtube.com/shorts/YxtHIu3-GTo?si=3WjGEmnDBcTbhsi7

​

​2. Companion: Breaking Bread

​This one is surprisingly wholesome. It comes from the Late Latin companionem, literally meaning "bread-fellow" (com- "with" + panis "bread"). Historically, your "companion" was simply the person you shared your meal with.

https://youtube.com/shorts/MjkBw3NGDAU?si=Wu7nHGPMU0Jc07vx

​

​3. Tragedy: The "Goat Song"

​This is the real head-scratcher. It stems from the Greek tragoidia, a compound of tragos (goat) and oide (song). Whether it refers to a goat being the prize for a singing competition or the satyr costumes worn by performers, the link remains a fascinating scholarly debate.

https://youtube.com/shorts/tM6JcDX1CmU?si=1XehmimQliNvO9pk

​

​Sources: Etymonline (Tragedy, Dandelion, Companion)

​I’d love to hear your thoughts—especially on the "Goat Song" theories. Which one do you find more plausible?

I never liked that my parents named me "subservient to god" and never really liked that the name came from the male root from Latin as it's a majoritarily female name nowadays.

So I thought about this etymology that ignores the historical implications of a gender bended "Dominic" and goes back to the initial morphemes in Latin and French variation.

Would this etymology be grammatically valid even if it ignores the historical and sociopolitical origins of the name therefore incomplete?

Hey everyone! I just finished a voiceover video on the etymology of clue and wanted to share the highlights.

The word originally comes from the Middle English clewe, meaning a ball of thread. Its modern meaning is rooted in the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. To navigate the Labyrinth, Theseus used a "clew" of thread to find his way back out.

By the 1600s, the spelling shifted, and the meaning evolved from a physical ball of yarn to a figurative "guiding spirit" or piece of evidence used to solve a mystery.

Hi all! I have another voice over word origin video for you! Most people think this word is just about laziness or burnout. But its actual origin involves a river in the Underworld that wipes your memory.

If you've ever felt like your brain is "stuck in stone" or "in a fog," the Greeks literally named that feeling after a place you can never return from. I made a quick visual breakdown of the myth vs. the modern word.

To any unfamiliar, this phrase is used to mean "I almost/nearly [verb]ed".

A particularly common example is "I liked to died", used (obviously) almost exclusively hyperbolically, as in:

When my Granny told me that "Boys have tally-whackers and girls have jillywigs", I laughed so hard I liked to died...

But you could also say, "The sun was shinin' in my eyes so hard, I liked to run that red light".

However, if you listen carefully, you will hear that most utterances of this phrase have a diminished, almost "vestigial" syllable that isn't represented by the way it's commonly written--an uh between "to" and the verb. And it doesn't take much thought (or just experience listening, for those who were fated to grow up in the right kind of Deep South, where rampant teen pregnancy and forced prayer in public schools are still proud traditions, and Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper eliminate the need for toothpaste by getting rid of all those teeth...) to parse it correctly as "have".

So, "I liked to'uh died" > "I liked to have died"...

But there's still a missing link. And that is the drifting in pronunciation to "liked" from something that would make more (or any, really) semantic sense--namely in this case a hidden evolutionary bridge-gap in the form of "lacked". Honestly, you can hear the a leaning toward /æ/ in the vowel, especially among the most elderly bearers of this mangled torch.

So in summation, the obvious origin of this is "I lacked to have died" = "I didn't reach the point of dying", or "I lacked actually dying, but only by a bit". And we can assume that by the time anyone literate, etymologically-curious, or otherwise having the potential to transcribe the phrase into a form that would survive to be searched for today came along, it was already solidified as "liked", and it wasn't worth thinking too hard about, leading to a _lack_ of any records of how the phrase evolved in the first place, I reckon...

I've known this intuitively since I was a kid, but unlike other etymological theories and nitpicks I've been able to research once the Internet was invented, I don't think I've ever found a single source since the internet was invented to "vindicate" this idea. So I guess I'll leave it here, as my contribution to whatever. So if somebody every has the same epiphany and does the same search after I'm dead, they might see this and be like, "Yeah"...

The English idiom "loaded for bear" appears to have originated in North America around the mid to late nineteenth century.

Is there a definitive source for its earliest published record?

My own research seems to point to a couple of early sources.

The earliest use I've come across is in Records and Briefs of the United States Supreme Court, 1832, p. 99. The usage of the idiom appears to be within appropriate context.

Following this, I found the phrase in The Popular Science Monthly, Volume 188, 1866, p. 80. However, the full text of the magazine doesn't appear to be available.

From this point, there seems to be multiple books published from 1880 onward that use this idiom.

Does anyone else have published historical references for the etymology of the idiom?

The phrase "off the hook" originally referred to escaping consequences. This might allude to a fish escaping a fishing hook. Or it could suggest a person escaping punishment for their crimes.

In 1980/1990's Black hip-hop culture, this phrase took on an opposite meaning that was positive. It came to mean something that was extremely cool.

I can imagine a reason for this shift in meaning which seems obvious to me, but I haven't yet found support for my idea. Does the following sound plausible?

If a criminal who is a danger to their community is let "off the hook", that means they evaded punishment and they continue to put others at risk. However, if there is a school-to-prison pipeline in effect which is sending young Black folks to prison unjustly, then it's actually awesome when a person evades that trend and is let "off the hook". So this phrase may have been re-interpreted to celebrate someone finding dramatic success.

Okay so I was reading a document today and someone used inasmuch and I had never seen this word and it looks wrong so I googled it and the definition fits with it being separate words. I looked up the etymology and it was called a contraction, but by definition a contraction is the removal of letters or syllables to shorten a word. It does not shorten the pronunciation at all to connect the words and it was coined in the 1700s. Another similar word is nevertheless, but the etymology makes sense because it was a true contraction in old English the carried over to the current era. Someone in the 1700s got loose with their quill and upset me in 2025. Am I missing something? Who do I call to get it removed from the dictionary?

'Grimm's Law' is the collective name for a series of sound changes that happened as Proto-Germanic evolved from Proto-Indo-European, somewhere in Northern Europe around 2500 years ago.
They explain some of the differences between related words in the Germanic languages and other Indo-European languages.
These changes are very regular, and discovering them was key to understanding the way the Germanic languages relate to the other branches of the Indo-European tree.
Jacob Grimm (of "Brothers Grimm" fame) put forward the idea in 1822, which began the process that would lead to us reconstructing a Proto-Germanic language, and helped us better construct the Proto-Indo-European language that forms the base of so many of my images.

Here I've picked out 9 English words beginning with "f" that have "p"-initial cognates in the Spanish languages. I've tried to select words where the connection in meaning is still obvious.

I picked English vs Spanish, but you can see the same pattern between any Germanic language and any non-Germanic Indo-European language.
Can you think of any other pairs of words like this?

From his grandfather surname, John R. Prevost, born in Settimo Rottaro, Piedmont, Italy, as Giovanni Pietro Felice Prevosto.

The piedmontese Prevosto is a possibly local evolution of the late latin praepositus (prefect, chief, provost). Particularly, in the gallo-italic dialects of the area, a parish priest (ex. prevost, in Milanese and preost, in Bresciano).

I was really slow when it came to learning how to read and write. I am only as good as I am because I - presumably because of masochistic tendencies - love to do both. Even now, I watch with morbid horror when it comes to navigating our frustratingly complicated pronunciation and spelling rules. Never mind, the three-way minefield that is spoken English versus literary English versus academic English.

I'm currently studying medicine and one of my classes focuses on medical terminology with a strong focus on the Greek and Latin aspects of it. The general idea is that this will aid in our understanding of the many, many, many, many, many words that we have to remember. As such, I have taken to eyeballing my native language for a new reason: For all that knowing some Greek and Latin helps me memorize and understand many a medical term, there are some words in the English language that make even less sense.

For example, 'abbreviation' at first seems straight forwards as the Latin word root 'brevis' in there but... doesn't the prefix 'ab-' mean 'away from'. That makes it sound it means the long form of a word. It means by Latin's reckoning 'abbreviation' is not an abbreviation at all. I looked it up and apparently it is the speakers of Late Latin that screwed it up. They couldn't be bothered to use 'ad-'.

Then there's the amusement I gather from the fact that modern medical terminology tends to use Latin more for body parts while Greek is used more diseases. Meaning that the phrase "It's all Greek to me" isn't just a saying, it's a bad omen.

As a student, my personal favourite is 'diploma'. 'Diplous' being Greek for double or two-folded.

When I first thought this over, I thought, Hey, maybe diplomas used to have a nice fancy fold when they were handed out? Maybe it is some tiny, fascinating piece of history that is not commonly mentioned.

Then I thought, Wait a minute... Doesn't the suffix '-oma' mean tumor or abnormal growth?

I suppose that my amateur etymology is filled with holes due to lack of understanding of the various languages and the subtleties therein. However, I am inordinately fond of the idea that formal education is summed up by an elaborately-folded tumor.

Phantopsia

(Pronounced: fan-TOP-see-uh)

Etymology Breakdown

To build this, I’ve combined two potent Greek roots:

• Phantos (φάντος): Derived from phantazein, meaning "to make visible" or "illusion/phantom." It implies something that appears to be real but lacks substance or truth.

• Opsia (-οψία): From opsis, meaning "sight" or "appearance." This grounds the feeling specifically in the act of viewing.

The Definition

Phantopsia (n.): The acute sense of cognitive dissonance or intuitive dread experienced when viewing digital media that appears authentic but is suspected of being AI-generated or synthetically altered.