Wordwizard

Duckling, the Greek word 'mónos' means alone, singular, lonesome, abandoned; as an adverb it means only, merely etc.. There are many derivatives such as 'mónachos' = single, the origin of the English word 'monk', and then of course all those composites such as monotony, monogamy, monopoly etc.. Ther...

A bit off-topic but maybe interesting: Duckling's initial posting shows that the syllable '-pol-' in Greek words and words of Greek origin is pretty polyvalent and sometimes can be misleading: - In 'monopoly' it comes from 'polein' = to sell. - In 'police,' 'politics' and the like it comes from 'pol...

Back to the Alps from Northern Michigan, where ice fishing on thousands of lakes is very popular, I wonder what the origin of the word 'lunker' is. A lunker is a big game fish of mostly undetermined species. The word can also be used in a more general sense for anything unusually big for its kind. H...

Jen, as you could read on the hubris / conspiracy thread, that alleged relationship between conspiracy and hubris actually wasn't much more than a bad joke. There is not the slightest connection or relationship between those two words. The relationship between 'hybris' / 'hubris' and 'hybrid,' howev...

Mirror, a brief look at entries like 'justice' and 'just' in one of the dictionaries mentioned on our home page will show you that the origin of the word 'justice' is much older than Justinian. Actually it's more than 1000 years older. Simply put, the Latin word 'ius' (often spelled 'jus') is the ro...

Mike, the fish symbol also has another connection to Jesus Christ, in that the first two Greek letters of the Greek word for fish, ichthys, namely I (iota) and X (chi), traditionally stand for Iesous Christos (a bit like X (chi) and P (rho) often stand for the first two letters of Christos). On the ...

The German word for a pancake is 'Pfannkuchen,' where the first part is a slightly shortened form of 'Pfanne' = pan, whereas the second half means a cake. In other words, it's exactly the same as in English. Which does not necessarily rule out the 'pain = bread' version, since sometimes etymological...