podictionary - the podcast for word lovers

A rerun podcast from 2006

This word highlights the dangers of electronic media.

I looked up bamboozled in the Oxford English Dictionary online, that's where the draft third edition can be found.

There is a verb to bamboozle and a noun bamboozle so I clicked on the etymology for the first one listed...

From 2006

Some listeners have been asking for words that arose from languages other than Latin.  I chose hyena out of the blue, thinking, that's likely to be African isn't it?

Which just goes to show how hard it is to get away from Latin and Greek roots since hyena too arrived in English after the...

A repeat episode from May 2006 

I got the idea for this word of the day from reading more about the Oxford English Corpus, that dictionary maker's tool said to have a billion words in its database.

One of the things that lexicographers have been able to do, that they weren't able to do before, is g...

From June 2006

The podictionary word for today is “mall”:  I'm not a mall person, but of course every now and then I need to go to the mall to buy something.  Would you have suspected that the word we use to describe this collection of stores originates in a word for "hammer?"  The word I'm t...

An old episode from May 2006

The other day I mentioned that Richard Lederer had brought up a word with an interesting background and "umpire" is the word.

An umpire is of course the official who enforces the rules in baseball and a number of other sports.  In some sports the official isn't called a...

A rerun from May 2006

I can think of three meanings for the word train right off the top of my head.

There is the train that people might ride on either to go to work every day or when traveling around Europe.

There's the training that takes place in classrooms and...

From April 30, 2006...

I find in the Oxford English Dictionary that there are ten words pale spelled pale.  None of them are a bucket, which would be spelled pail.

One at least is short for pale ale, so that's okay, but I want to talk about the one that's behind the phrase "beyond the pale."...

A rerun from 2006

If I am doing a good job at podictionary I hope that I've astonished you with some of my unexpected histories of words you thought you already knew.

Well, at least I hope I have astonished you in the modern sense, not in the sense the word held when it first appeared in English...

A repeat episode from April 2006.

Right around the time when Shakespeare was alive there was another guy in Germany by the name of Johannes Kepler.

He was quite the guy.

Wikipedia tells me that he wrote science fiction.  He must have put his imagination to good use in the realm of science fact as w...

Again from 2006 - This is a fairly well known story due to a great book that I'll mention later.

In the year of our lord 1247, in the City of London was founded the priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem.

As a rich person might do now for tax purposes, the land for this priory was donated by one of the she...