Intellect PlusCards starting with T
45,693 cards. Page 719 of 762.
The word butter may literally mean cow cheeseButter's name runs back through Latin to a Greek word that likely joins ox or cow with cheese. Making it means smashing microscopic fat droplets until their protective skins burst…
The word Canadian once meant only French colonists along the St LawrenceIn the 16th to 18th centuries, Canadien referred to French settlers in what are now Quebec and Ontario. The first known use covering English settlers too came in June 1792, when P…
The word cartoon started as heavy paper for frescoes, then became a jokeFor centuries a cartoon was a full-size design drawn on sturdy pasteboard, used to guide painters of frescoes and weavers of tapestries. The funny meaning arrived in 1843, when Pu…
The word Catholic originally meant universal, but its meaning shifted to signify orthodox belief.Derived from ancient Greek, the term catholic once described the entire, all-embracing church. By the second century, however, it evolved into a label for those teaching the compl…
The word chapel traces its origins to a soldier’s cloak and a holy relic.A chapel is more than a small church. It is a versatile space that has evolved from a portable tent for a king’s relic into a global fixture of airports, hospitals, and universiti…
The word cheque may trace back through chess to the Persian word for kingDictionaries link the banking sense of check to guarding against forgery, a use of check meaning control. That meaning comes from chess, where check reached English through French…
The word cider travelled from Hebrew through Greek, Latin and French to EnglandOld English speakers called fermented apple juice simply apple wine. The word cider arrived later by a winding road: from a Hebrew term for intoxicating liquor, through Greek, Chu…
The word cisgender borrows the same Latin prefix Romans used for GaulRomans called northern Italy Cisalpine Gaul, meaning Gaul on their side of the Alps. That same Latin prefix, cis, now sits in chemistry, cell biology and the word cisgender, first…
The word class began as a Roman census category for military serviceClass comes from the Latin classis, the label Roman census takers used to sort citizens by wealth so they could decide who owed what military service. Only in the late eighteenth …
The word cloak shares roots with clockMedieval Latin called a traveler's cape a bell-shaped garment—and that bell gave us both cloak and clock. From Roman citizenship togas to Aztec elite capes and Aboriginal possum-s…
The word cloud originally meant a lump of rockIn Old English, clud meant a hill or a mass of stone. Around the 13th century people began applying it to heaped rain clouds that looked like boulders, and the metaphor eventually…
The word Comanche comes from the Ute word for enemyThe Utes, who call themselves Núuchi-u, 'the people', gave Utah its name and once ranged across the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin. The Comanches were their allies before becomi…
The word compact was invented to make small American cars sound respectableIn 1950 Nash had a problem: Americans associated small cars with cheapness. So an executive coined a gentler label for anything with a wheelbase of 110 inches or less. He called i…
The word cyberpunk was built by mixing two lists of wordsBruce Bethke wrote one list of technology words and another of troublemaker words, then spliced them until something clicked. His 1980 short story gave a name to a whole mood of s…
The word cyclone was coined by an East India Company official in CalcuttaHenry Piddington, a British East India Company official, wrote 40 papers on tropical storms from Calcutta between 1836 and 1855 and gave them a name from the Greek for circle. A c…
The word daisy began as day's eye, for a flower that sleepsThe common lawn daisy shuts its whole head at night and opens again at dawn, which is probably how it got its name: day's eye. Chaucer called it the eye of the day. Its flowers al…
The word devil began as the Greek for slandererThe oldest religions had no Devil at all. Egyptian and Mesopotamian gods could help or harm on a whim, and evil was simply part of how nature worked. The idea of a single cosmic e…
The word digital began with fingers and an anti-aircraft gunDigital shares its root with digit and the Latin digitus, finger, because people counted on their hands. Its modern sense arrived in 1942, when George Stibitz of Bell Telephone La…
The word documentary was coined reviewing a 1926 filmBefore "documentary" had a name, cameras chased trains, factory gates, and prize fights as "actualities." In 1926 Scottish filmmaker John Grierson, reviewing Robert Flaherty's Moa…
The word electron first named a unit of charge, not a particleIn 1874 George Johnstone Stoney proposed using a single basic lump of electric charge as a unit, and he later suggested calling it the electron. The particle had not yet been disc…
The word era originally referred to brass counters used for calculating ancient financial taxesWe use eras to organize history, but the term has humble, metallic roots. Derived from the Latin word for brass money, it evolved from a system of counting tax years into a tool f…
The word estrus comes from the gadfly Hera sent to torment IoIn Greek myth, Hera sent a stinging gadfly to chase Io, whom Zeus had turned into a heifer. The insect's name, oistros, came to mean frenzy, and biologists borrowed it for the hor…
The word for 'Lord' that traveled from Persian kings to Turkish sultansPasha is more than just an old title; it is a linguistic fossil of imperial power. From its roots in ancient Persian royalty to its role as a high-ranking aristocratic rank in the…
The word fundamentalist was coined proudly, by a Baptist editor, in 1920Today fundamentalist is usually an insult, but it began as a badge. American Protestant conservatives compiled a short list of non-negotiable doctrines, printed pamphlets to defen…
The word gala began as an Arabic robe of honourGala comes from khil'a, an Arabic word for a ceremonial robe, and only became a synonym for festival in the 18th century. The word festival itself was an adjective for two centuri…- The word ghee shares an ancient root with the English word ChristGhee comes from the Sanskrit ghṛta, clarified butter, traditionally linked to a root meaning to sprinkle. That makes it a linguistic cousin of the Greek khristós, anointed, source…
The word ghetto began as Venice's locked Jewish quarter in 1516Before it named any poor district, ghetto pointed to one Venetian island neighbourhood in Cannaregio. A 1516 decree confined Jews there, separating them from the rest of the city.…
The word ghost once meant breath, and before that probably meant furyNearly one American in five says they have seen a ghost, according to a 2009 Pew survey. The word they use has a strange past: Old English gast meant breath or spirit, and linguis…
The word gossip once described a sacred bond between godparents and close friends.Far from its modern reputation as idle chatter, the term gossip originated in the Middle Ages to describe a tight-knit community of women supporting one another during childbirth.…
The word gun may come from a giant crossbow named Lady GunildaIn the fourteenth century Windsor Castle housed an enormous mechanical bolt-thrower nicknamed Domina Gunilda. Her name, likely from the Old Norse Gunnhildr, built from two words f…
The word hacker began as MIT slang for pointless, playful tinkeringTo most people a hacker breaks into computers. To many programmers it is a badge of honour for clever tinkering. Both meanings trace back to students at MIT around 1959, when mode…
The word ham originally meant the crook of the kneeIn Old English, ham was the hollow behind the knee, from a Germanic root meaning crooked. Only around the fifteenth century did it come to mean a pig's cured hind leg. The food is…
The word heaven may share an ancient root with hammer and stoneIn Beowulf, the Old English heofon simply meant the sky. Linguists trace it back to a Proto-Germanic form, and one theory links that to an Indo-European word for stone, perhaps th…
The word hijab originally referred to a curtain, not a headscarfWhile we commonly use the term to describe a headscarf, the Arabic word hijab literally means a partition or barrier. From its origins as a physical curtain in early Islamic histo…
The word Hispanic has roots in ancient Rome, but its modern usage is fluid.Tracing its origins to the Latin Hispania, the term Hispanic has evolved from a geographic descriptor for the Iberian Peninsula into a complex, often debated, meta-ethnic label. T…
The word hypothesis once meant the plot summary of a Greek playIn ancient Greek the word literally meant placing something underneath, and theatre audiences used it for a synopsis of a drama. Today it names a proposed explanation that must ri…- The word intifada means more than just a violent uprising against an occupying forceWhile often associated with Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, the Arabic term intifada literally describes a shaking off or awakening. Historically, it has been used t…
The word jerky comes from the Andes, via Quechua ch'arkiBeef jerky owes its name to ch'arki, a dried meat the Quechua peoples of the Andes traditionally made from llama, cured by fierce mountain sun by day and freezing cold by night. T…
The word Judaism first meant something closer to Judaeanness than to a religionWhen the Greek term behind Judaism first appeared, in the book of 2 Maccabees in the 2nd century BCE, it named a whole way of being Judaean, set against those who adopted Greek cu…
The word jungle comes from a Sanskrit term meaning rough and aridJungle began life in ancient India as a word for dry, rough ground, not dripping forest. Its tangled, impassable meaning grew partly from a misunderstanding: European explorers tr…
The word kamikaze first described typhoons that scattered Kublai Khan's invasion fleetsLong before 1944, kamikaze, or divine wind, was the name for the storms that wrecked Mongol invasion fleets off Japan in the thirteenth century. Japan's wartime leadership revived…
The word kamikaze first meant the storms that wrecked Kublai Khan's fleetsLong before it named suicide pilots in the Second World War, kamikaze, meaning 'divine wind', described typhoons credited with destroying Mongol invasion fleets sent against Japan…
The word lens comes from the Latin for lentilA lens bulging on both sides looks a lot like a lentil, and that is exactly where the name comes from: lens was the Latin word for the legume. The object itself may be far older t…
The word lily may trace back to an ancient Egyptian word for flowerLilium comes from the Greek leirion, borrowed through Coptic and Demotic from an Egyptian word simply meaning flower. Plenty of plants carry the name without earning it, from wate…
The word mantra shares an ancient root with thinking, dating back about 4,000 yearsA mantra can be a single syllable like Om or a long sacred phrase, and some carry no literal meaning at all. The word comes from an Indo-European root meaning to think plus a suff…
The word meme was invented by an evolutionary biologist in 1976Richard Dawkins coined meme in The Selfish Gene as a cultural counterpart to the gene: a unit of culture that copies itself from mind to mind. Seventeen years later Mike Godwin ap…
The word meritocracy was originally designed as a warning, not a goalWe often view meritocracy as the ultimate ideal of fairness. However, the term was actually coined to describe a dystopian nightmare. Far from celebrating talent, its creators use…
The word miscegenation was born as a political hoax to manipulate American voters.Far from a neutral scientific term, miscegenation was coined in 1864 as a piece of election propaganda. Designed to smear the Republican Party, the term was intended to incite rac…
The word moped came from a Swedish journalist, not motor-velocipedeIn 1952 the Swedish journalist Harald Nielsen blended motor and pedaler into moped. The popular story that it comes from motor-velocipede is wrong. Early mopeds genuinely needed t…
The word multimedia was coined to advertise a 1966 Long Island disco showLong before CD-ROMs and streaming, multimedia described a nightclub act. The singer and artist Bob Goldstein used it in July 1966 to promote Lightworks at L'Oursin in Southampton,…
The word nomad began as ancient Greek for a pastureNomad traces back through Latin to a Greek word for pasture, and grazing still explains much nomadic movement. Mongolian herding families typically relocate just twice a year, bet…
The word oxymoron is itself a self-contradictory term, meaning sharp and dull simultaneously.An oxymoron is a figure of speech that pairs opposing concepts to reveal a deeper paradox. Interestingly, the word itself is autological—it is a literal example of what it describ…
The word pacifism was coined in 1901, though opposition to war is ancientFrench peace campaigner Émile Arnaud invented the word pacifism, and fellow activists took it up when their tenth international peace congress met in Glasgow in 1901. The idea beh…- The word pagan was actually a piece of Roman military slangBefore it described ancient gods, 'pagan' was a derogatory label for civilians and peasants. It was an exonym—a name imposed by outsiders—created by early Christians to distinguis…
The word pantheism was coined by a mathematician twenty years after Spinoza diedSpinoza is the thinker most tied to the idea that God and the universe are one, yet he never used the word. An English mathematician, Joseph Raphson, coined it in Latin in 1697. W…
The word pea exists because English speakers misread pease as pluralEnglish originally had the noun pease, as in pease pudding. Because it ended in an s sound, speakers assumed it must be plural and trimmed it to make a singular: pea. Linguists ca…
The word pirate began as a Greek term for someone who triesBehind the English word pirate sits a Greek noun meaning brigand, built on a verb for attempting. Literally, a peiratēs was anyone having a go at something. Early English writers …
The word pixel entered print through pictures from Moon and Mars probesIn 1965 Frederic Billingsley of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the word pixel in print to describe the dots making up scanned images sent back by space probes. He had picked i…
The word pizza is older than tomato sauce by centuriesA Latin note from Gaeta in 997 AD already mentions pizza, long before New World tomatoes. Today's dish—leavened flatbread with tomato, cheese, and toppings baked hot—is tied to Na…
The word plasma describes two entirely different things depending on your perspectiveIn the cosmos, plasma is the dominant state of matter, making up 99.9% of the visible universe. Yet, in human biology, it is the straw-colored liquid foundation of your blood. The…