For the physicist, liquid is the state of matter between solid and gaseous, and for nonphysicists it’s probably something to wet the whistle on a dry day. But it has long been attached to other concepts in several related verbs: ...

The growth in popularity of cycling as a sport, and a means of commuting, has resulted in the evolution of a new species: the mamil (Middle-Aged Man In Lycra). The origin of the term is disputed. Wikipedia will inform you ...

The evergreen pine is one of the proverbial “friends of winter” in China and Japan, and still a symbol of Christmas celebrations in the southern hemisphere. In German tradition, the persistently green needles of evergreen trees are symbolic of fidelity ...

In this year’s Australian Open, Andy Murray was described by commentators as bageling his semi-final opponent, before being bageled himself in the final. This is not a new way of abusing your opponents by hurling bread at them. Rather, it ...

The birthdate of the word scofflaw (one who flouts laws that are minor and unenforceable) is known much more exactly than most: January 15, 1924. It was the winning entry, out of more than 25,000 in a competition held in ...

The word Gothic (in Latin “gothicus”) would have struck terror into the hearts of 5th-century Romans, with its dark connotations of barbarians pouring out of Germanic wilderness to destroy their civilisation. Centuries later, Gothic seems to have shaken off its ...

Both anecdata and anecdota are cousins of anecdote, a 17th-century loanword from French that goes back to the Greek word anecdoton, meaning “something unpublished”. The earliest English citations have it in the plural form anecdota and glossed as “secret history/histories” ...

The term google has become so familiar – both as the proprietary name of the Internet search engine and as the act of searching on it – that it’s easy to disregard what a strange word it is. The company’s ...

These fish names originate from one and the same word, according to the earliest Southern Hemisphere records published in Morris’s Dictionary of Austral English (1898). At the entry for trevally,Morris gives the alternative spellings trevalli, trevalla and travale,and suggests they ...

A recent blog entry for Cambridge Dictionaries Online (June 23, 2014) recorded a new use of the word creeping to mean “secretly viewing online information about someone”. This usage combines the idea of stealth behind the verb to creep with the suggestion that someone who does ...