Etymology - Share your favourites

Question

I know I'm not the only one here who is fascinated by etymology, I was just doing the flashcard set 3.11 and I learned that "El Hipocampo" is "Sea Horse" and I wanted to find out if it was related to the part of our brains "Hippocampus"

And I went here: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=hippocampus The Hippocampus in your brain is named after a fictional sea-monster it resembles.

Learning Spanish so often ends up teaching me about English etymology, which is fantastic! All the other languages I ever learned were so so distantly related to English that I almost never found any cool coincidences like this, now I find them all the time.

Another one was "Arco Iris" (rainbow) I wondered about the relationship with "iris" in your eye and i found that the iris in your eye is named after a type of crystal that, being a crystal, makes a rainbow when you shine light through it.

And another thing was when looking up the etymology of colours I found that our word "orange" actually developed from something very very similar to "naranja" > "narancia" I also read that orange trees and oranges were named so long before we started referring to the colour as "orange"

So I want to know all your favourite etymologies! Go!

http://www.etymonline.com/ http://etimologias.dechile.net/

i absolutely love this post. i loove to study etymology also :D - Austin67427, May 28, 2011

Good one rabbit. - heliotropeman, Sep 5, 2011

Answer 1

And another thing was when looking up the etymology of colours I found that our word "orange" actually developed from something very very similar to "naranja" > "narancia" I also read that orange trees and oranges were named so long before we started referring to the colour as "orange"

The word was originally Sanskrit, and it was introduced in Europe through the Arabs. The French distorted the sound, dropping the initial N, and English and many other languages took it from the French, as usual. Spanish still keeps the original initial N.

Regarding my favourite one, there are thousands of them. Just at random, vaccine/vaccination (vacuna), used by E. Jenner, who was intrigued by the fact that milkmaids who suffered the mild disease of cowpox never contracted smallpox, so he injected pus taken from a cowpox pustule into some children's arms, resulting in immunity to smallpox, a dangerous disease then. The word "vaccine" means "cow" in Latin (cf. "vaca" in Spanish). The term "vacuna" (vaccine) means literally "cow-related".

All of the information about orange was on the page I read about it originally, but I only retold the bits I found paticularly interesting. We learned about the first vaccine in school, but I never knew that was whre the name came from! - rabbitwho, May 29, 2011

You left out the bit about him intentionally trying to infect the little boys with smallpox, which would have been a death sentence if his idea hadn't worked! - rabbitwho, May 29, 2011

Answer 2

De la palabra etimología, esto mas q otra cosa nos ayuda a ampliar el vocabulario y mejorar la ortografía.

Ejemplos de etimologías:

Geos.- tierra

Pisci.-pez

Bios.- vida

Logo.- Estudio

Murphos.- forma

Tanathos.- muerte

Micos.- hongo

Ficos.- alga

Podos.- pie

Fonos.- sonido

Oros.- relieve

Kriptos.- oculto

Graphos.- escritura

Arthron.- articulación

Génesis.- formación

Heteros.- diferente

Homos.- igual

Psico.- mente

Hidro.- agua

It is Thanatos . - faliron, May 28, 2011

Also "morphos" instead of murphos. - faliron, May 28, 2011

Answer 3

I love the Latin word terra because it gives us words such as... tierra

extraterrestrial

terrain

I also like the root dict (from the Latin dicere) because it is the basis for the words

decir

dictionary

and of course SpanishDict ;D

Cool! - rabbitwho, May 29, 2011

Answer 4

"Analfabeto" illiterate .Taken from Greek unchanged: in spelling ,pronunciation (almost) and meaning.

Answer 5

It all makes me think that the Tower of Babel story is backwards (rTS, NOW i AM DOWN to a splint on the laST two parts of mi dedo meñique izquerido, ND and it keepts hitting the shift lock as well as the a ...) ... It is said by the scientists of DNA that we are all descended from one particular woman; I wonder if she gifted us all with language (note use of word "gift" as a verb)

We're all descended from one creature who first developed this symbiosis with a mitocondria. She might have been any kind of creature. Mitochondria are fascinating, you know they have their own DNA? - rabbitwho, Sep 5, 2011

They live in our cells but they are a whole different lifeform to us! - rabbitwho, Sep 5, 2011

It's a happy and ancient symbiosis at the cellular level. - pesta, Sep 5, 2011

Answer 6

I'm going to use the opportunity for shameless bumping since everyone is talking about this topic at the moment.

Recently I learned that.. oh wait no I can't tell you that.. it's dirty.. PM me...

So I'll substitute this for it..

I was watching a documentary on BBC recently on Galileo and the man was saying how it's no coincidence that the word "revolution" has the concoctions it has today.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=revolution&allowed_in_frame=0

It's cool that it reaches back like that, and it makes me think about the effect it must have had on people. Like when I realized that we don't see things we see light bouncing off things. That, unlike most of what we were learning in school, was really counter-intuitive and shocking.

You mean, "Galileo" ? - pesta, Sep 5, 2011

You know about avocados, right? :-) - MLucie, Sep 5, 2011

You mean "Effect," not "Affect." - MrSillyInc, Sep 6, 2011

I'm never going to get Affect and Effect down and I apologise to Galileo for my mistake but never Eeinstien because he knew my pain. - rabbitwho, Sep 6, 2011