podictionary - for word lovers - dictionary etymology, trivia & history

In 1705 a British poet named Matthew Prior—reputed to be the high point in poetry between John Dryden Alexander Pope—wrote a poem called An English Padlock. Be to her virtues very kind; Be to her faults a little blind; Let all her ways be ...

In high school I had a wonderful teacher, Mr. Martin. SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days. He brought the arcane mathematics of physics to life, in part by putting a human face on them; and he ...

I grabbed a few uses of the word entail from Twitter. Someone was tweeting about what new health care laws might entail; another person asked a friend about what a change to their plans might entail. SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for ...

For most of its existence the word shave did not refer to hair removal. Men have been scraping the hair off their faces (or not) time out of mind and our word shave is old too. It first appears in Old English in 725 and the experts trace its little ...

Today people are victims of injustice or fraud as well as car accidents and homicide. This is an improvement over victims of ages past that were restricted to having to have died to qualify as victims. The word victim comes to English from Latin in the ...

If you were looking for talent would you look at the gym, the bank or in church? SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days. One of the more popular definitions of the word talent at Urbandictionary ...

If you were looking for talent would you look at the gym, the bank or in church? SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days. One of the more popular definitions of the word talent at Urbandictionary ...

Being disoriented didn’t used to mean being confused. SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days. To orient oneself is to figure out how or where you are in relation to other things. Orienteering ...

The shoe company Nike takes its name from a Greek goddess. SPONSOR Get a FREE audiobook and 14-day trial today by signing up at www.audiblepodcast.com/podictionary When I first became aware of the shoe company it wasn’t entirely clear that its name ...

EB White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, wrote of commuters: One who spends his life In riding to and from his wife A man who shaves and takes a train, And then rides back to shave again. A commuter is of course someone who ...

Was Nike’s slogan anticipated 600 years ago? Nike made the three words “just do it” famous. It’s almost a philosophy of life wrapped up on eight letters. That’s why something from an ancient poem called Secrets of Old Philosophers caught my ...

Being in a trance is better than it used to be. SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days. I looked up trance at wordnik and I see they list 19 definitions. Here’s the first one pulled from The ...

The panting my dog does is because she is hot and since she doesn’t have sweat glands she has to move air over her tongue to cool off. SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days. When I pant it’s ...

I’m not exactly certain why the science show Nova chose its name. All it means is “new.” SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days. I mean there’s a Canadian province called Nova Scotia; ...

The babies and babes I’ll be talking about here are the ones brought by storks, not those picked up in bars. SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days. The word baby appears first in Middle ...

There’s an etymological reason why calculations with an abacus can leave paper and pencil in the dust. Before the invention of pocket calculators most people did calculations with a paper and pencil. Some people found this too time consuming and ...

Paint arose in Middle English from French, or as the latest update to The Oxford English Dictionary puts it from Anglo-Norman, a refinement in definition of the language that was being spoken by the descendants of the Norman Invaders from 1066. SPONSOR: ...

Hors d’oeuvre is a tough one to spell because not only has this double barreled word retained its original French spelling, we in English have changed it’s pronunciation a bit to suit what feels most comfortable on our tongues. SPONSOR: GotoMeeting ...

A pawn is the lowliest payer on the chess board. But why are they called pawns? Today I’m going to talk about four words pawn. In some ways they all have to do with the lowly. When people are desperate for cash they sometimes pawn their ...