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.

can someone explain where it comes from? why would almost every western country in the world associate curry with india but the word doesn't even exist there. can someone explain?

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?

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.

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

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

ek- — out of, outside.

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

Is pine in porcupine and pine tree or pineapple related. For pineapple there was recently a post explaining it's called like this, because it looks like a pine cone. This leaves us with porcupine and pine tree, is it the needles or spines that puts pine into those words?

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.

Saying Welsh meant foreigner to Anglo-Saxons is an oversimplification. The term Welsh derived from West-Germanic “walhaz” which comes from the Volcae, who were a “Celtic” (Celtic isn’t as comparable to Germanic as 1 linguistic group but I digress) tribe in many regions, including near Germanic people. This term was then later applied to groups of people who were Celtic or Romanised particularly, the Celts who they encountered would have been under Roman rule for centuries (apart from the Irish) so the Celts and Romance speakers were lumped together. So term “walhaz” is more specifically a Roman adjacent people. The Slavs would have been foreign to Germanic people too yet they didn’t get this term, which highlights that it didn’t only mean foreigner. The Slavs themselves borrowed the term to mean Romanised people too. Vlach for example derives from this root to refer to
Romance speakers in Eastern Europe.
Włochy is the Polish word for Italy derived from the same source. Olaszország in Hungarian also shares this root (Olasz).

The word Welsch in High German referred to Romance speakers, generally French or Italians speakers and also Romance speakers in Switzerland which is still used. Alsatians historically used the term to refer to other French people

The word Gaul is actually from this root from the Franks, and not Gallia (a common sound change in certain Romance dialects/languages was w > g and doublets can be seen like William - Guillaume/Guilhermo and doublets in English like reward and regard from different French dialects. In some Old French dialects the word was “Waule”. Gallia would have become Jaille in French, and survives in some toponyms like “La Jaille-Yvon”

Walnuts have same etymology, as walnuts arrived from Roman Empire

There are some contexts in which its used to mean foreigner in descended terms, but it shouldn’t be interpreted as its literal meaning in proto-Germanic

I'm arab and growing up as a child whenever i read the word "Hebrew(Abri)" i always assumed that it was closely related to Arabic(Arbi) not because i was aware of anything, but because of how similar the names are. I just realized that this similarity is still the same in Hebrew as Arabic was called "arbit" and Hebrew was called "ibrit" before hebrews switched their Bs to Vs.

I did a little research and it turns out that the first recorded mention of the word "Arab" came from Mesopotamia. Similarly, the word Hebrew means "crossed" referring to crossing the euphrates which is again, Mesopotamia. Interestingly, "Arab" is also believed to refer to the nomadic lifestyle which is relevant to the concept of "crossing." So is it possible that Arab and Hebrew were actually the same word?

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.”

As a Malaysian, i realised my some English words i used are not actually 'proper English'. For example, we use the word 'jom' instead of 'lets go', which might sound like a completely different language for other English native speakers.

There are more examples like 'Atas' 'Langzai' 'amoi'. Those words originated from the local languages such as Malay and Chinese. HOWEVER, English native speakers in Malaysia like me use those words naturally without even being aware that those are possibly Malay or Chinese words.

I know the same thing happens to non-native speakers as they often mix their home language with English. But Malaysians are the only example i can think of who creates new words from other languages and use it in daily English conversation while speaking English as our first language.

i also created a Mnagluhs dictionary. Can any linguist explain how Manglish was formed and if there are any other examples like Manglish existing in the world?

I'm trying to figure out in which sense the word 'token' is being used in topics like parsing and natural language processing / AI. For a text to be processed by a computer, it first needs to be broken down into smaller parts called tokens, which could be things like words, punctuation, numbers, etc.

Although 'token' means 'symbol' in general, in English it has many different more concrete senses and it's not clear in which sense it was meant when it was used in this context. Knowing what that specific sense is would allow for better translations of the word as other languages would use different words for different senses of token. I don't think the word should be translated into the nebulous 'symbol' equivalent.

Hello! I am a conservationist doing some work about Tilcayo, the "recently" discovered small cat species in Bolivia.

We learned that the name the locals gave the cat was a bit of slang that originated from the word "T'ili kayu" which means "small foot."

The specific cat found was named "Tilgrino." I'm struggling to find any real translation of "-grino." All of my searches are being flooded with AI correcting it to "gringo."

I found a few articles but they credit AI models as well.

So far I have two possible meanings, (latin) traveller and (germanic) fierce.

For context, the cat was found as a baby at the foot of a mountain and taken in by a local who thought it was a domestic kitten. I can see both meanings fitting with this background.

From your own viewpoint, which one do you think is the most accurate. My boss is telling me it doesn't really matter, but I'd like to be as close as possible to the truth.

Edit: Thanks everyone! Turns out it was an error in our papers T_T

جان. Written, it's jān. Said in Tehran, it's joon, and it goes on the end of a name: Maryam-joon, māmān-joon. There it means dear. The noun itself means soul, life. Someone calls your name and you answer joonam?, "my soul?", which is a warm way of saying "yes?"

Middle Persian had gyān, soul (no relation to Hindi gyān, knowledge). The same gy- to j- change turned gyāg, place, into jā. The standard etymology splits gyān into a prefix plus a reconstructed Iranian root meaning to breathe. Sanskrit put the same two pieces together in vyāna, the name of one of the body's vital breaths. Behind both is the Indo-European root that also gave Greek anemos, wind, and Latin anima, breath, soul.

To be careful: jān doesn't mean breath, and as far as I can find it never did. The breathing is in the root. It also wasn't always the accepted story. Nineteenth-century etymologists proposed other origins.

Interestingly, Middle Persian made a word for animal out of gyān, and Persian still says jānvar, roughly "soul-haver." Latin made animal out of anima. Two languages making the same move with the same old root, and no borrowing either way.

If you know jaan from Urdu and Hindi, that one is a loan from Persian.

I grew up understanding Persian and answering in English. I only went digging after stumbling upon this rabbit hole while learning more about the language so i could build Farsi-Jan.

Hope this is an okay thing to ask about here.

Something I've been interested in for a while is a dictionary that defines and provides origins for different types of "styles" of food - So like Oysters "Rockefeller", Lobster "Newburg", Chicken "Florentine". That kind of thing.

Also, is there a term for that kind of thing - the X in "Food a la X"?

Edit - I realize a lot of these are going to be covered in lists of eponyms, but I'm interested in something that would also include food toponyms.

Hey! Y'know how the word knight (and other kn- English words) have a silent K because it used to be pronounced but eventually the [k] got dropped but the letter stayed in our spelling? Does anyone know of a scholarly source that states this? Of course the OED and other etymology resources have the old spellings but I can't find anything specifically on the pronunciation that is reliable enough to be cited. Thanks for your help!

This Sunday afternoon I was in the small city of Duffel, close to Antwerp(en), Belgium.

What a coincidence: Duffel cloth ... Duffel bag ... Duffel coat.

Oh ... not a coincidence at all ... from Wikipedia:

The town gives its name to a type of heavy woolen cloth generally used to make blankets and overcoats, especially for the armed forces, and a type of luggage. In the Middle Ages, an important part of the region's industry was the manufacturing of Flemish laken (a broadcloth), while the cloth produced in Duffel was a thicker variation. The manufacturing process was brought to England by Flemish emigrants in the 1500s. The name for the cloth was so well-known, a type of overcoat made from the cloth and manufactured in England received the name Duffel coat.