Origin of Words

Every word has an origin story.  Some aren't particularly interesting, the particulars of other have been lost to time, but among the more recent additions to the language, there are some interesting stories to tell.

The field of study that concerns itself with the origin of words is called etymology.  Better dictionaries will include a short etymological statement about a word and the more-or-less unlimited nature of the Internet means expanded explanations are as available anytime and nearly anywhere.

Most of the words in the English language have an origin in an older language with Latin, Greek and German being common sources of words.  How these words became a portion of those languages is something that is perhaps unknowable beyond the fact that someone at some point in history made a noise and that noise became that word.

That's how a word like cowabunga exists.  Etymology.com explains its origins as something that a character on the Howdy Doody show would say in a moment of excitement.    Here's a video that kinda goes into it, but it is described as a "magic Indian word."



More recently, there are many words that have been added to English because of the Internet.  Google is a good example.  Even a decade ago people didn't associate a web search so heavily with one engine - nobody ever said Yahoo it.  As Google became the standard, the company's name slowly became a verb.

Internet slang words are also fast appearing in the annual list of things Webster or Oxford are adding to its list of words.  Stuff like "woot" and "noob" were given that legitimacy sometime earlier this year.  I remember when the noise associated with "lol" was just a slight mispronunciation of a town in Massachusetts.   

But my favourite modern origin story is the one behind thagomizer.  This word describes the spikes on the tail of a stegosaurus.  The invention of the word is credited to Gary Larson and his comic strip The Far Side.  

Apparently the thagomizer never really had a name before being dubbed the thagomizer by Larson in 1982.  Wikipedia reports (with links to external sites) that the term has been used by academics as well a the Smithsonian Institute.