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This month's Word for Wednesday theme is school.
The word school comes from the Old English ‘scol’ meaning ‘place of instruction’, from the Latin ‘schola’ meaning ‘intermission of work’ and ‘leisure for learning’. The idea of children attending a school is from around 1300 and the idea of a school building is from the 1590s.
So far we’ve looked at the words semester and teacher. Today’s word is pupil.
A pupil is a learner who is enrolled in an educational institution. The word is usually used to refer to schoolchildren.
Pupil was the Late Middle Eng...
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Our July Word for Wednesday theme is flowers.
The word flower entered English around 1200 as ‘flour’ (with spelling variants including ‘flur’, ‘flor’, ‘floer’, ‘flor’, ‘floyer’, and ‘flowre’). It comes from the Old French ‘flor’, from the Latin ‘florem’. The word was used in reference to both blooms and grain until the late fourteenth century, after which the spellings ‘flower’ and ‘flour’ were used to differentiate between the two.
So far we’ve looked at the words delphinium, lily&nb...
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August is drawing to a close and to get you prepared for the start of the academic year in just a few day’s time, we’ve chosen a school-related word for this week’s Word for Wednesday.
The word pupil has two meanings. It can be used to describe a school student and the dark circle at the centre of the iris in an eye. Although not all homonyms have the same origin, both versions of the word pupil derive from the Latin ‘pupilla’ meaning ‘doll’. While it’s not too difficult to see how the meaning of pupil might have evolved from doll, to child, to schoolchild, to student; you might be wondering where the eye-related meaning comes into the...
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In true Easter spirit our Word for Wednesday this week is the word ‘egg’.
Eggs have been a consistent food source since the beginning of humanity.
Throughout the history of the English language, the word ‘egg’ saw a handful of spellings before we settled on the Old Norse, ‘egg’. Let’s take a look at a few variations:
Old English: ‘oeg’ or ‘eai’
Middle English ‘eye’ or ‘eyren’
The borrowed Norse ‘egg’ first saw popular use in northern England in the mid-fourteenth century and by the fifteenth century anyone wanting to buy ‘eyren’ might not have been understood at all.
Interestingly, the word egg has a few other contexts other than its common noun form. You can ‘egg someone...
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