A new book exploring the origins of common food terms — from bialy to lima bean to bibimbap — is a fascinating history of how we eat and cook. By Kim Severson Used judiciously, the snappy tidbits of ...

When Gulliver came across that race of brutes known as Yahoos during his travels to fantastic lands, who could have guessed that one day that name would be worth $200 billion on Wall Street? Coined by ...

Last week I wrote about the origins of words for fruits in English (and judging from the comments, irked a few people—go figure). Alas, I am merely a journalist, not a linguist, so I can't give a much ...

Philosophically speaking, a word is not simply a word in the sense that it just exists like a fixed cannon fodder, to be hurled back and forth in the premises of a conversation. Words hold context, ...

One of my college history professors once claimed that the reason there is no English word that rhymes with orange is that it is one of the few words derived from Persian. He was only partly right; ...