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...
Can you believe December starts tomorrow? We're going to be sharing Advent Anagrams next month, so if you enjoy a good puzzle, make sure you stay tuned! In the meantime, here's a round-up of this month's posts! I've spent November exploring the influences of Latin on the English language. I finally know what 'ad hoc' means, and have developed a (perhaps unhealthy) habit of telling every new person I meet where 'Thursday' got its name from. You can find the links to my posts below. Latin expressions in English - Part One Latin expressions in English - Part Two Where the months get their names from Where the days of the week get their names fr...
Everybody needs a little bit of luck sometime. The word itself originates from the 15th century Dutch ‘gheluc’: ‘happiness, good fortune’(Online Etymology Dictionary). Eventually, this shortened to ‘luc’. The modern German descendant, ‘Glük’ means prosperity. It is suggested that the word made its way into English via the gambling scene. Also worth noting is that fifteenth century Middle English featured a verb, ‘lukken’ meaning ‘chance’. Perhaps today’s ‘luck’ is a merging of its two ancestors: ‘Gheluc’ and ‘Lukken’ combined to mean the ‘chance of good fortune&r...
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