November’s Word for Wednesday theme is fireworks. A firework is a device with an explosive that burns with coloured flames. The word dates to the 1570s from the Old English ‘fyr’ and ‘work’. Last week we looked at the word sparkler and today’s word is fountain. A fountain is a firework which is propped in the ground and, once lit, erupts a shower of sparks in the shape of a water fountain. Fountains often produce whistling sounds and bangs. The word fountain, in reference to a spring of water, dates to the early-fifteenth century and comes from Old French ‘fontaine’, from the Medieval Latin ‘fontana...
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...
Having woken up to a bout of spectacularly apocalyptic weather this morning which has continued for the whole of the day, I felt moved to explore the etymologies of what are widely known as the four ‘Classical Elements’: terra, aqua, aer and ignis (earth, water, air and fire). ‘Earth’ comes from the Old English 'eorþe' meaning dry land, and by the time this word was widely used around 1000 years ago it had already began to refer to the earth in the wider, terrestrial sense. The word ‘Water’ as we know it comes from the proto-Germanic 'watar', meaning just that. Etymology Online suggests that Proto Indo European (PIE) had two stems for the word water. The most interesting of those can st...
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