Sporadic Etymology

And here I thought this would be a boring one! It seems to have originated in the 18th century, when scientific writing was commonly done in Latin and Greek. Although an earlier use of the letter treated it as the circumference of a circle itself, mathematician William Jones adopted it as the constant we know today. 

More beautiful visualizations of pi on Martin Krzywinski’s site.

Always interesting seeing words that start off somewhat neutral or even positive and gradually become negative.

This is commonly misspelled as “unphased,” although Oxford counts it as an alternative form. I speculate that this is due to the fact that “phase” falls in frequency bands 5 and 7 as a verb and noun, respectively, whereas “faze” is in band 4.

Another autological word (literally “sharp-dull” in the original Greek).

Yaaay, false cognates! I’m always pleasantly surprised by these, for some reason.

For those wondering, “influenza” comes from the Italian word of the same sense as the Old French, referring to “astral, occult, or atmospheric influence“ in the spread of epidemics.

A professor gave an incorrect etymology for this one in class... I figured posting this would be more constructive than calling him out on it.

As is often the case, this word was inspired by someone mispronouncing it.

Inspired by Reddit user OmitsWordsByAccident.

This word, often mispronounced as “chromosone,” is named for an identifying characteristic noticeable to the discoverers, like many structures in biology (see also hippocampus and cerebellum).

Photo credit: Andrew Helmer

These doublets are sometimes confused in my field, so I dug into their relationship. Fascinatingly, the Greek root ὤν is cognate with the words for “to be” in many languages through the Proto-Indo-European root: Old English eom (English am), Latin sum, Sanskrit अस्मि ‎(asmi), Old Armenian եմ, Luxembourgish sinn, and Dutch zijn.

I stumbled across this one while looking up the definition of “lowbrow.” Other English examples include lowlife, redhead, old money, houndstooth, sabretooth, and (I think) deadbeat. 

I believe bahuvrīhi also qualifies as an autological word, which is just about as much fun as the fact that it sounds like a lyric from the Whos’ song at the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.