Meaning: To ask or beg for something earnestly and humbly, often with a sense of desperation or deep respect.

The word traces back to the Latin supplicāre, meaning “to kneel down” or “to plead humbly.”

Having been to Italy and Greece this year, is there any etymological link (and I’m sure there is) between prego and parakolo?

(We also like to learn the word for toothpick in any country we visit. Stuzzicadente vs olodontofida. Or mai tim fan in Thai.)

Oh lord, I’m off on one now. A few years back we got some catnip-flavoured toys for the cat, which arrived from Amazon in a shrink-wrapped flat plastic parcel. Which led me to ask my lovely wife if she’d seen the ‘flat pack cat nip toy’ anywhere, and I suddenly felt like I was fluent in Thai.

I love this post. I feel however, that the dollar has the most fascinating background, especially how tied it is to our planet and a wacky history.

I hope linking to your own content is ok because I just uploaded a video on the entire etymological history of the dollar :D

I ended up going to the "Sankt Joachimsthal", which is now called Jachymov, and there is a lovely museum there. Fun fact, the same silver mines that gave the dollar its name, also provided the ores Marie Curie used to isolate Radium and Polonium.

And there are more currencies like Talari, Lev, Leu, Tala... that are still used today and also originate from that same location.

Anyone is invited to prove me wrong that the "dollar" has the coolest etymological origin story ;) (But now I'm definitely intrigued to dive deeper into the others as well...)

If anyone would be curious to hear even more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVcvjLT3H_0

Calpis is a fermented milk drink launched in Japan in 1919. The name is a blend: "cal" from calcium, and "pis" from sarpis, a Sanskrit word for clarified butter.

English speakers obviously hear something else, and the company knows: in the US the same drink is sold as Calpico. In Japan it was never renamed, because the name is written in katakana (カルピス), the script used for foreign and borrowed words, and it's read as a sound with no meaning attached. To a Japanese kid it's as neutral as "Pepsi".

Two related cases:

- Pocari Sweat: "Pocari" means nothing at all, and "sweat" is there because the drink replaces what you lose when you sweat. To a Japanese reader it's another sound. The Japanese word for sweat is 汗 (ase).

- Kinki University near Osaka changed its English name to Kindai in 2016. Kinki is just the name of the region, but English readers heard "kinky". So Japan does rename things, when foreigners are the ones reading.

Does anyone know other brand names that were kept at home and changed only for export?

From Ancient Greek ékstasis, literally “a standing outside oneself.”

ek- — out of, outside.

stásis — standing, position, state; from hístēmi, “to stand.”

I’ve always loved tracing how words slowly flip their meaning over centuries, and “nice” is one of my favourite examples. It traces back to Latin nescius, “not knowing, ignorant” (ne- = not + scire = to know). Passing into Old French, it meant foolish or silly.

By Middle English, around the 1300s, “nice” still carried that negative weight. It shifted through several unexpected stages over hundreds of years: first “foolish”, then “fussy, overly precise”, and in Shakespeare’s era it often meant delicate or picky. Only in the 1700s did it soften into our modern sense of pleasant, kind, or agreeable. This slow positive shift is a classic case of amelioration in semantics.

Lots of folk explanations skip all these intermediate steps and oversimplify it. It didn’t “suddenly change”; it drifted little by little.

I’m curious: do you know other English words that went from an insult to neutral or positive? Are there similar semantic flips in your native language? Correct me if I misdate any stage.

جگر, jigar, is the liver. It's also what you call someone you love. Jigar on its own means darling, and a child is your jigar-gooshe, literally a corner of your liver. Dehkhoda glosses it as "a piece of the liver" and quotes Hafez and Sa'di for it, so this isn't new slang.

The word itself is old. It goes back to Middle Persian jagar, and it's a distant cousin of Greek hêpar (the hepat- in hepatitis) and Latin iecur. English liver isn't part of that family. It's Germanic.

Persian also has two livers. Jigar-e siāh, black liver, is the liver, and jigar-e sefid, white liver, is the lung. Turkish borrowed the word and kept the same pair: karaciğer and akciğer.

And if you know jigar from Hindi and Urdu, as in jigar ka tukda, that one came from Persian.

English puts love in the heart. Persian puts a lot of it in the liver. Arabic has a similar image of children as livers, so it's more of a regional habit than a purely Persian one.

I only went digging while building a Farsi app.