857: gallimaufry Apr 13, 2017

When one word has two or more distinctly different meanings, like 'gallimaufry' referring to a jumble of things or a food, there tends to be a historical reason.  The word comes from the two elements 'galer' which was Old French for ‘have fun’, and the Picard (which was the dialect of French that has most influenced English) 'mafrer' meaning ‘eat copious quantities’. While that wasn't very specific, the word which became 'galimafrée' took on the meaning of an unappealing dish. More specific still, the word soon was used to reference a meal of minced meat, especially hash. Much in the way that 'hodgepodge' is used to mean something somewhat carelessly thrown or jumbled together first meant a mutton stew, 'gallimaufry' now has the meaning of a medley of things which was gained from earlier food-related connotations. For more on mixes, click here.

856: maybe, perhaps, and mayhap Apr 12, 2017

The words 'maybe', 'perhaps', and 'mayhap' can generally be used interchangeably, though some are chosen more frequently than others. Not only do those terms have related meanings, but their formations are all quite similar; the three of them were all originally stated as a phrase in the same way as 'goodbye' began as 'G-d be with you'. 'Maybe' may be the most understandable, as—much like in that clause—'may' is a modal verb and so guarantees that 'be' is not conjugated. Since 'may' in this case will always be followed by 'be', people just joined these together and interpreted the meaning adverbially. With 'perhaps' and 'mayhap', these both happened to come from 'hap' which is not used often at all anymore, but meant 'occur by chance' or more intuitively, 'happen'. 'Perhaps' comes from the meaning of 'per' as 'through' i.e. 'through chance', while 'mayhap' has the same first element as 'maybe'.

855: inevitable and unavoidable Apr 11, 2017

There are many words that are created by back-formation such as 'gruntled' from 'disgruntled', but plenty of words exist which have no positive form, such as 'inevitable'. This word was adopted into Middle English from the Latin 'inevitabilis' which is the negative form for 'evitabilis' (‘avoidable’). While 'unavoidable' is a synonym for this, it is not the case that one ultimately comes from Latin and the other from, say, Old English; both 'avoid' and 'inevitable' are Latinate, but 'avoid' came through Old French first. Moreover, 'avoid', originating from the Old French 'evuider', initially meant ‘clear out, get rid of’, relating more to the modern word 'void' (or 'vuide') meaning ‘empty’. This is related to the Latin 'vacare' (‘vacate’), and while in Middle English, 'avoid' could mean to empty something such as a trash it also denoted abandoning something. In this way, 'unavoidable' and likewise 'inevitable' referred to something that could not be abandoned. Though with 'avoid' now, the sense of emptying is obsolete, this meaning is still kept with the verb 'void', as in 'voiding one's bowels'.

854: baby Apr 10, 2017

The word 'baby', much like the word, 'mom' and 'dad' come from imitating the way and infant babbles. In fact, even 'babble' comes from the way babies may repeat 'ba'. This same garble that gave English 'baby' and French 'bébé' also gave Hindi 'babu' and kiSwahili 'baba', the latter two both meaning 'father'. In the same way that people will make words in association to the way simple, basic manner babies speak, there are a great number of phrases that come from the many connotations people have to babies. One of many of these idioms, 'baby blues', refers to blue eyes that babies have, but for a long time this also was a sort of euphemism for postpartum depression.

853: error, err, and errand Apr 9, 2017

While 'wander', 'wonder', 'wind' etc are all related through a Germanic root, you will also find in English a slew of words related to the meaning of wander that come from Latin. The words 'error' and the verb 'err', which rhymes with 'her' and it is considered erroneous to be pronounced like 'air', all (including 'erroneous') come from the Latin verb 'errare' meaning 'to make a mistake', but also 'go astray' either from a literal path or perhaps a more philosophical one. The words that were adopted into English tend to relate to mistakes and not meandering, but you might now assume that 'errand' would be related. If you did, then keep in mind that to err is human, and it turns out 'errand' is Germanic and the Old English 'ǣrende' meant 'message' or 'mission'.

For more, see 'vagabond'

852: delilah Apr 8, 2017

Plenty of common Western names have some biblical relevance. It is usually from the frequency of these names that terms like 'john' referring to a man who hires prostitute, or foundation the baseball team, Yankees, come about. Some names, such as 'Delilah', are also used as nouns separate from the name, but with connotations stemming from Scripture, and not contemporary connotations. It is from the story of Samson and Delilah where the sense of the word as 'seductress' began, but the name was around for much longer than this. There is disagreement concerning the true etymology of this word, but it either comes from the Hebrew element 'dal' meaning 'weak' or the Hebrew for 'delight'. Unlike other much older names like 'Matthew' or 'John', 'Delilah' only started to be used as a name in the 17th century with the Puritans, though it gained more popularity following Saint-Saens' opera, Samson and Delilah (1877). Like 'John' which also appears in other languages as 'Jean', 'Juan', 'Jan', etc. Delilah has at least 15 variant transcriptions including 'Dalia', 'Dalialah', 'Delylah', and even 'Dalida' in French.

851: Quotation Marks Apr 7, 2017

Much like with capital letters, quotation marks were initially used just to identify what the author felt was particularly important. This mark, which appeared as two lines like || in the margins, could be for anything, not just for quotes. When printing-presses became more common, printers in Central Europe especially started to use curved lines and in the 17th century,the usage of these for quotations became more or less the standard. What was not standard was the appearance of these marks, and this is still the case today. The French, and later Russian, Arabic etc quotation marks: «  » kept the punctuation in the middle, closer to how there were initially hand-written, whereas Germans lowered one and elevated the other: „ “ and kept them pointed inwards. Other countries adopted variations of these such as the Swedish ” ” with both facing the same direction, and the similarly angled „ ” used in parts of Central Europe, not to mention American English's, “ ”. This gets even more varied when alternates are included, as two countries that use the same primary quotation marks may use two different sorts of punctuation when adding in extra quotes, e.g.
I said, "Mr. Smith told his son, 'eat your soup' ".
This sentence which uses American standards would, for instance, have use the opposite quotations (single and double) in the UK.

850: cygnet Apr 6, 2017

When diminutive suffixes are added to words in English, they tend to be specific to certain words. For instance, a young duck is a 'duckling', a young goose is a 'gosling', but a young cat is a 'kitten', not a 'catling', even though all of those words are of Germanic origins. Some words for animals do not even use suffixes, but employ adjectives like 'cub', though this is equally dependent on individual terms. The term for a young swan, 'cygnet' does not appear so use a diminutive suffix, but certainly does not use an adjective either (unless some people may prefer 'baby swan' for simplicity). While some terms for young animals, as with 'puppy' or 'baby' are completely separate that the word for the mature form, but 'cignet' does have a diminutive suffix after all. The word 'swan' comes from Old English, but the word 'cignet' comes from the Old French 'cigne' ('swan'), so the '-et' suffix, logically, is also from Romantic origins. This suffix is also present in 'budget' and 'ballet', also from French.

849: arse and cuss Apr 5, 2017

When it comes to the aspects that distinguish accents or dialects, any number of subtle differences may be noted, but this tends to boil down to pronunciation, vocabulary, and certain syntactic differences. Someone from New York would not say, 'car' in the same way as someone from London, but this is more obviously a difference in pronunciation of a the same word and not a different word as is the case with 'truck' 'lorry'. In the case of 'car', it is the rhoric-r for the Americans but a non-rhotic-r for the English. It might seem that 'cuss' is just another vocabulary word, distinct from 'curse', but in fact this is due to historically non-rhotic r's employed in the southern United States that eventually got its own spelling. In America, for standards in pronunciation, people tended to use the conventions in the North where there were more people and more money, however this did not happen in the case of 'ass'. In parts of the United Kingdom that still use rhotic-r's, 'arse' is said instead of 'ass', but as luck would have it, this became an exception to the rhoticity in what is now considered Standard American English. Of course, there is no single consistent way of speaking, even in one region, which you can learn about here.

848: aardvark Apr 4, 2017

Spelling, and pronunciation-rules are nothing more than conventions in order to maintain understandability. This is especially true in English were the sound /a/ in 'father' or 'tot' can be written with an 'a' or an 'o'. It is quite telling then to see a word with that sound spelt with 'aa' in 'aardvark' and one could expect not only would this unlikely be English in origin, but probably wouldn't come from, say, Swedish which uses the character 'å'. The double-a is quite common in certain German orthographies, but more notably perhaps: Dutch. This in fact originates from the Afrikaans—or South African Dutch—words 'aarde' meaning ‘earth’ and 'vark' meaning ‘pig’. Funnily enough, this spelling was kept when it was adopted into English, but now it is spelt 'erdvark' in Afrikaans. English also got the word 'aardwolf' from this same Afrikaans word, but those creatures are more closely related to hyenas than aardvarks.

847: nonchalant Apr 3, 2017

Among the synonyms for 'nonchalant', you would find, 'calm', 'composed' and 'blasé', as well as 'cool'. One cannot, at least not in any standard English way, be 'chalant' because the word was adopted from a French term meaning ‘not being concerned,’ with the 'non-' prefix already added. The stem of that verb is derived from the Latin 'calēre' meaning 'to be warm'. While it may not sound like it, 'lee-' as in 'leeward' meaning the side shielded from wind also is related to this, although that word originates from the Old English, 'hlēo'. Quite often, words for emotional distance or kindness are related to temperature, and even the terms, 'warm', 'cool', and 'cold' are used to describe people's attitudes. It should not be a surprise then that even words borrowed from other languages still follow this same pattern with 'nonchalant' meaning 'not warm' in a literal or historical sense. 

846: guinea Apr 2, 2017

There is an abundance of terms that feature the word, 'Guinea', including,  'guinea fowl', 'guinea grass', 'guinea worms', 'guinea (coin)', and the countries 'Equatorial Guinea', 'Guinea', and 'Papua New Guinea', not to mention 'guinea pigs'. All but the last two items of that list relate to Africa, specifically the region of West Africa, south of the Senegal River along the Gold Coast. English gets the word from the Portuguese 'Guiné' which refers specifically to the people of the region, but the etymology of this is uncertain. A leading theory, however, is that it comes from Berber 'Genewah' meaning, 'burnt people'. The terms denoting things outside of Africa, may still relate to this region, but only distantly. While 'Papua' is a native word, the latter half of 'Papua New Guinea' comes from 'Nueva Guinea' coined by Yñigo Ortiz de Retez when he thought that these people looked similar to Africans. While that was not based on anything scientific, some controversial genomic analyses in the last decade have indicated that an early wave of Africans may have migrated to Papua New Guinea tens of thousands of years before the wave of migrants into Eurasia whom eventually branched out and over time populated the rest of the continents.

845: Long Hundred Apr 1, 2017

Not all cultures use a base-10 system for mathematics. Some peoples have used 20 as their base for counting, and some have used 12, which is not too hard to believe considering there are separate words for eleven and twelve before getting into the -teens, not to mention that there are twelve inches in a foot and twelve sections on a clock. While that same distinction for 'eleven' and 'twelve' exists in Romance languages, the Romans counted in base-10, as can be seen with Roman numerals, and the word 'digit'. Therefore, when they encountered northern Germanic tribes, they translated what is now 'hundred' as 'centum' (100) without taking into account that the Germanic 'hundred' was equivalent to 120. To avoid this confusion between these hundreds, people now use the term 'long hundred' for the Germanic one. Therefore, when the Icelandic historian, Snorri Sturluson wrote about the size of the peasant army that fought King Olaf II in AD 1030 as 'one hundred hundred', this would be 14,400 and not 10,000.

It should be noted that while a 'long hundred' equals 120, a UK 'long hundredweight' is equivalent to 112 lb avoirdupois.

844: gallic Mar 31, 2017

The common chicken has the scientific name Gallus gallus domesticus, which is in Latin like other taxonomical classifications. Seeing then that 'Gallic' is also of Latin origin, it would not be ridiculous to assume that this would be in some way related to chickens, but it instead is a synonym for 'French' or the Gauls in particular. Etymologically, this is just coincidental, as 'Gaul' (or in Latin, 'Gallicus') does not have any direct relation to 'gallus'. Nevertheless, the rooster is in many ways symbolic of French or French-speaking culture, featuring on the emblem for French national sports teams and on various memorials, and is on the flag for the Walloon Movement. While this, again, may have been nothing more than coincident, many people throughout history have noted this connection, and this animal is thought to have been sacred to the people of modern-day France for millennia. Some records indicate that the Gauls considered this animal sacred, and the Christians then took it as a symbol for watchfulness when Catholicism replaced Celtic religions.

843: Cases: Upper and Lower Mar 30, 2017

Writing with just plain-and-simple words on a page is not too complicated and tends to be fairly straight-forward and logical. Punctuation, diacritics and fonts however are new and merely conventional. Most Roman texts, for example, had no punctuation, no lower-case, no macrons like those seen today, and spacing was not common for many centuries in that long literary history. All of those features now used in English writing were just to make things visually simpler, but the standards we have now were not always those we currently use. As mentioned, there was no lower case; these variations only came about over many centuries when scribes would use different tricks to fit more words on a page. With letters hence becoming smaller, writers needed ways to make things stick out. Elaborate rubrics for the first letters of chapters or pages were common, but so was just adding capital letters, or majuscule to important words. This started as anything: some people capitalized all nouns (as is still the case with German), some only capitalized names of people and places, and some started capitalizing the first letter of every sentence. Today, each writing-system has its own standards, but this changes language-to-language, country-to country, and especially alphabet-to-alphabet.

For more of these conventions, see this on apostrophes

842: cravat Mar 29, 2017

There is some debate as to where neckties originated, but in Europe and elsewhere, various types of neckties have been worn for centuries or even longer, especially by those in the military. Perhaps the most common type of tie today, though it may be diminishing in popularity, is the necktie, similar in style to the cravat. This resemblance is not accidental, and in much 17th century art, you'll find portraits of many European men with ruffled, oft-laced, wide ties. This fad started quite quickly after the French adopted this trend after seeing Croatian mercenaries in France whom would wear these same sort of scarves. In fact the word, 'cravat' comes from the French, 'Cravate' meaning ‘Croat’ referring to these soldiers.

841: blackmail Mar 28, 2017

In TV, books, or perhaps even real life there is more than enough blackmailing, this does not involve any dark-colored postage at all. Although it is a single word, as you might expect, this is certainly a compound of what is now 'black' and 'mail', this does not mean that the second element in this is related at all to the post. Instead, this comes from the Middle English, 'male' which comes from the Old English 'mal' meaning '(legal) agreement', and also only coincidentally is spelt the same as the sex. In some places, 'male' became synonymous for 'rent' which was often paid in silver, leading to the phrase 'white money' and 'whitemail'. Some people were forced to pay extra fees to landlords as a sort of "protection money", and this then became termed 'blackmail' in parts of England and Scottland. There is some debate as to where the 'black' comes from, but the two main theories are that it is either just opposite to 'white' with some negative connotations, but also the Scott's Gaelic word, 'blathaich' meaning 'protection' could have led to the identical spelling and pronunciation as the color.

840: nepotism Mar 27, 2017

When people talk about 'nepotism' it denotes a particular sort of favoritism that allows for people to obtain and maintain power within families. This is a fairly new word, coming into English only in the mid 17th century. There wasn't as much of a need for this word when the most common form of governing in Europe was based on ruling families with power transferring from, usually, father to son. In the papacy, however, many roles were elected, but this system was also fraught with corruption. While power technically could not transfer from Pope to son, as the pope was not allowed to have children, this still happened. The Italian word, 'nepotismo', which gave us 'nepotism' comes from 'nipote' meaning ‘nephew’ as often the Pope would give privileges to his usually illegitimate sons whom were called his 'nephews' as a sort of euphemism.

839: vandal Mar 26, 2017

When people say 'vandal' now, or any of its derivatives, it refers to someone who destroys or defaces something, especially public property more often than the historic Germanic tribe. This does come from the name of the group which in AD 455 sacked Rome, though. Many other names for the various European tribes whose original names were Latinized or simply disregarded completely by the Romans, which is why the Welsh for 'Welsh' ('Cymraeg') or the German for 'German' (Deutsch') are so different from the English, explored more here. The Latin name for the Vandals, however was 'Vandalus', as well as the Old English, 'Wendlas', came from the tribe's name for itself. It is supposed that this comes from a Proto-Germanic root for, 'wanderer', which you can see more about here with 'vagabond' or here with 'wind'.

838: digit Mar 25, 2017

It is not clear necessarily whether when someone says, 'digit' if that refers to fingers or numbers, unless maybe you are having a conversation with a mathematician or a surgeon. This similarity is not coincidental, though the connection to numbers specifically occurred later. This term comes from the Latin noun, 'digitus' meaning either ‘finger' or 'toe’. The sense of the word as a number from 0 to 9 (or 10) came about due to the practice of counting on the fingers. Not all cultures use a base-ten system of counting, but those that did relied on the number of digits making the association very strong. Fingers also are, among many other things, used for pointing; indeed another term for forefinger or index finger is 'pointer finger'. Unsurprisingly then, the term 'diction' in the sense of telling or showing is related to 'digit'.