Word Origins – Page 10 – Interesting Literature

The Curious Origin of the Word ‘Computer’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the history and original meaning of a now ubiquitous word

Here’s a pub quiz question for you: in which century were the words ‘computer’ and ‘electricity’ first used in English writing? The twentieth? ‘Computer’ may lead us to that answer, but then we reflect on Michael Faraday’s important work on electricity in the previous century. And didn’t Charles Babbage devise a forerunner to the modern computer in his Difference Engine, some time in the nineteenth century? Perhaps that’s the answer.

The Curious Origin of the Word ‘Trilby’

How did the famous trilby hat get its name?

Here’s a question for you: what was the biggest-selling novel of the Victorian era? And who wrote it – Dickens perhaps? George Eliot? Robert Louis Stevenson? It was none of these, though they all enjoyed huge sales. Instead, the accolade arguably goes to a man who was principally known, not as a novelist at all, but as a cartoonist. (We say ‘arguably’ because reliable sales figures for nineteenth-century books are not always easy to find.)

10 Interesting Facts about Modern Words

Ten surprising stories and histories surrounding the language of the modern world

This week we’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, a review copy of Caroline Taggart’s book New Words for Old: Recycling Our Language for the Modern World. The book takes a look at supposedly ‘modern’ or contemporary words and examines their histories, revealing how they are often reworkings of older words which originally had different meanings. (This is something we particularly enjoy, as exemplified by our previous facts about modern words that originated in literature, which casts an appraising eye over such ‘recent’ formations as ‘selfie’ and ‘twerk’.) So Taggart’s book, which is out next week, is on a subject close to our hearts, and had a fair bit to teach us about word origins. Here are our ten favourite things which we learnt from New Words for Old.

A Short History of the Word ‘Serendipity’

The curious origins behind one of Britain’s favourite words – and its link to Gothic fiction Word origins, as demonstrated by the popularity of bestselling books like Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language, make fascinating reading. But ‘serendipity’ has a particularly interesting origin-story. The word ‘serendipity’ was invented on … Read more