Our Word for Wednesday theme for October is Halloween. The word Halloween likely dates to the seventeenth century but was popularised in the Burns poem ‘Halloween’ which was written in 1785. It is a Scottish abbreviation of ‘Allhallow-even’ which means ‘Eve of the All Saints’. ‘Hallow’ means ‘holy person’ or ‘saint’. Last week, we looked at the word witch and today’s word is banshee. A banshee is a female spirit from Irish folklore whose wailing, screeching, or keening foretells impending death. The word banshee has been used in English since 1711 and is a phonetic s...
Our Word for Wednesday theme for October is Halloween. The word Halloween likely dates to the seventeenth century but was popularised in the Burns poem ‘Halloween’ which was written in 1785. It is a Scottish abbreviation of ‘Allhallow-even’ which means ‘Eve of the All Saints’. ‘Hallow’ means ‘holy person’ or ‘saint’. So far we’ve looked at the words pumpkin and monster. Today’s word is skeleton. A skeleton is the hard structure of bones and cartilages that provides a frame for the body. Animated skeletons have been used to personify death since the Middle Ag...
If you’re one of our regular readers you’ll be familiar with articles about idioms, but every now and then we like to share a recap for our new subscribers. Here are Spellzone we believe that one of the reasons English is such a difficult language to learn is because it’s full of idioms. Every few weeks we take a list of popular idioms and translate them for our second-language English speakers. An idiom is an expression which has a figurative meaning rather than a literal one. For example, when someone says ‘needle in a haystack’ they probably aren’t actually talking about a needle and a haystack, but about something that is as difficult to fi...
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