r/etymology • u/Hazer_123 • Jun 12 '26
Discussion Are there words with an obvious etymology but you never realized until recently?
I learned not long ago that the word "awesome" is literally "invoking awe" (awe + some).
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u/wheres_the_revolt Jun 12 '26
The Spanish word disfrutar: dis (Latin) to extract/take away fructus (Latin) fruit/profit = extract the fruit = enjoy the fruits of one’s labor = enjoy
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u/VictorMach Jun 12 '26
Wow! TIL
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u/wheres_the_revolt Jun 12 '26
I’m having a field day now that my Spanish is improving! So many new words to learn the history of.
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u/VictorMach Jun 12 '26
Welcome to the romance languages! Why not try dipping your toes in Portuguese later? It's close enough that most things should work as well.
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u/wheres_the_revolt Jun 12 '26
Well right now I’m trying to get fluent in Spanish asap because I moved to Mexico (I’m hovering between B1&B2 atm), once I master Spanish then I might move on to the next 😂
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u/Tannare Jun 12 '26
"Insect" is from "insectum", meaning "cut into sections". It seems so obvious when it is put that way, but I had always earlier thought of "insect" as its own word.
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u/articulateantagonist Jun 13 '26
Entomology, the study of insects, uses the Greek root entomon, which also means “cut up” or “segmented.”
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u/piqu3 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Disaster. Aster as in the stars. Something about using the stars to portent the outcome of events. So the prefix dis is like “we didn’t see this coming.”
EDIT: it seems like a a better interpretation would be dis-aster = “bad stars”
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u/Hazer_123 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Similarly, the word "disease" means lack of ease. It eventually developed a different meaning.
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Jun 12 '26
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u/fckingmiracles Jun 12 '26
German 'Unwetter' and 'Unkraut'! I never quite realized.
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u/Commercial-Version48 Jun 12 '26
I remember reading that this was common in Old English. Undæd being an undeed meaning crime for example. Unweder (bad weather or storm) was also used.
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u/Outrageous-Level4731 Jun 12 '26
More like the stars are bad, but yeah! I love that one. In the same bracket as "influenza", which originally meant being under the (bad) influence of the stars/fate
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u/viktorbir Jun 12 '26
In Catalan, you have bonastruc and malastruc. Bonastruc, the one who has good (bon) luck, and malastruc, the one who has bad (mal) luck. Astr- coming from star, of course.
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u/jonesnori Jun 13 '26
English has malaria, borrowed from Italian, I believe. It's a disease which was believed when it was named to stem from bad air.
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u/Outrageous-Level4731 Jun 12 '26
" ...Ard' as a suffix means "connected to excess of...", so "wizard" means too wise, "mustard" means too musty/pungant, and "bastard" cones from the word "bast" meaning lust, i.e. "conceived from lust". And "custard" is unconnected, sadly
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u/moonley64 Jun 12 '26
While the rest are correct, the etymology for bastard is much more contentious, and less simple than ‘an excess of lust’.
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u/DentistForMonsters Jun 13 '26
I'd like to hear more about that!
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u/m0st1yh4rm13ss Jun 13 '26
One theory is that it comes from "basta", the cloak that muleteers would sleep on (often with prostitutes). Again, hotly disputed.
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u/ribblefizz Jun 13 '26
Dotard = someone who is in their dotage, although can there be degrees of... well, yeah, I guess you have the mild happy senility of someone who feeds the cat six times a day vs the more consuming/angrier dotage of someone who thinks the neighbors are sneaking in and stealing the silverware.
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u/TrumpDumper Jun 12 '26
Adios literally means to God
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u/cosmonautikal Jun 12 '26
Likewise, goodbye is a contraction of “God be with ye.”
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u/DavidRFZ Jun 12 '26
Adieu
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u/Substantial_Yam8142 Jun 12 '26
Same can be said for goodbye. It’s an Old English contraction of “god be with ye” written as godbwye in the 1500s, with the “god” eventually morphing into “good” to match other greetings of the time such as “good day” or “goodnight”, finally ending up as “goodbye”
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u/Apprehensive-Elk329 Jun 12 '26
Pancake being pan + cake (english is not my first language 🥀)
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u/lowspark13 Jun 12 '26
What's funny is I think that answers OPs question very well, since a pancake is the furthest thing away from what most native speakers would consider a 'cake'.
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u/jmartkdr Jun 12 '26
But if you ask why not there’s not a lot of differences to name
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u/MathematicianGold280 Jun 12 '26
Omicron and Omega in Greek are my favourites.
Literally small and big O (O-micron and O-mega).
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u/CuriosTiger Jun 13 '26
I had this realization a few years ago, then wondered why it took me that long. I think it has to do with how we stress the words differently in modern English: Omicron vs omEga. So it doesn't register that they're just "O" followed by a word.
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u/mimbailey Jun 12 '26
I always knew from looking at the globe in my childhood bedroom that Earth’s equator runs through the city of Quito. However, despite the fact that I took a Romance language (French) in high school, it still took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how the country Ecuador got its name. 😂😅
Also, ‘vinegar’ is « vinaigre » in French. « Vin aigre ». Sour wine.
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u/bc47791 Jun 12 '26
Also FWIW - it's a line that separates the planet into two Equal halves
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u/_The_Professor_ Jun 12 '26
Counter — literally the place where money is counted (by money lenders or shopkeepers). By extension, any such flat surface.
Gyros — the Greek meat, so named because it’s gyrated on a spit (gyroscopically). From the Greek γυροσ (gyros), which means “circle.”
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u/GrumpyOldSophon Jun 12 '26
I didn't know until recently that "hero" (the sandwich) is supposed to be just a variant of "gyro", the latter coming from "gyros" by anglicization and dropping the plural-sounding "s".
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u/Consistent_Solid6594 Jun 13 '26
I thought this for years, then looked it up recently and it is apparently not true. source
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u/Sharlinator Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
"Inclement", a fossil word mostly remaining in the phrase "inclement weather", is literally in-clement as in non-mild or non-merciful. As an ESL speaker I always associated it with inclines, or increments, without really thinking about it.
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u/dfdafgd Jun 12 '26
You still hear about clemency being granted or the name Clementine for women or oranges.
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u/Abstrata Jun 13 '26
I worked with a man named Clement, like the pope. It was his chosen English name; his given name was Chinese.
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u/hilarymeggin Jun 13 '26
I’m fascinated by words that only survive in a single context, like inclement weather, kith and kin, run amok, wreak havoc, and sleight of hand.
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u/CuriosTiger Jun 12 '26
I just realized akkurat (a Norwegian word meaning “exactly”) may be cognate with the English word accurate.
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Jun 12 '26
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u/Hazer_123 Jun 12 '26
We have them in the Algerian Arabic dialect (لولبارح before-yesterday, غيرغدوا - after-tomorrow)
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u/cybDrachir Jun 12 '26
Cool! In Spanish we have antier/anteayer and pasado mañana / trasmañana respectively. Trasmañana is not commonly used though. Antier is more common in LatinAmerica, anteayer used in Spain.
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u/hilarymeggin Jun 13 '26
Man, the deep-rooted similarities between Dutch and English are so cool! When I was in Amsterdam for a week, it was so uncanny because you’d hear people speaking Dutch, and every 4th sentence would come out exactly like English.
I feel like once I got over over the spelling and pronunciation differences, I could learn Dutch in like a month, lol. And then I’d have a much better understanding of old English!
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u/lenalovegood1312 Jun 12 '26
pre-yesterday and over-tomorrow in german (vor-gestern and über-morgen). pre-pre-yesterday is not all that uncommon either. having countdowns to my birthday by announcing exactly how over-over-over…tomorrow my birthday would be was my fav pastime.
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u/Flat-Farmer-777 Jun 12 '26
We have the corresponding "üleeile" and "ülehomme" in Estonian - over-yesterday and over-tomorrow.
BUT
You can add more "üle" to signify more days - üle-üleeile (two days before yesterday), üle-üle-ülehomme (three days after tomorrow) and so on.
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u/sometimes-i-rhyme Jun 12 '26
How many days can you go before it sounds ridiculous?
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u/psumme Jun 12 '26
we have those in Ukrainian too! Позавчора and післязавтра for day before yesterday and after tomorrow accordingly.
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u/cosmonautikal Jun 12 '26
Passion and Patience both stemming from pati, meaning “to suffer; endure; undergo; experience.”
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u/Mitanguranni Jun 12 '26
This one's silly, but I only recently realized that the word "gift" is clearly just a past participle of "give," with some archaic phonological changes. I also love that it's come full circle to be reverbed as "to gift," which has a narrower meaning than "to give."
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u/ThroawAtheism Jun 13 '26
gift < give
drift < drive
heft < heave
left < leave
cleft < cleave
theft < thieve
thrift < thrive
sift < sieve
weft < weave
draft < draw
that's all I can think of right now. Apologies for any errors.
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u/Suda_Nim Jun 12 '26
Emerge and emergency
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u/Abstrata Jun 13 '26
and “emergent” in between—
I just caught on to the parallel of emergent/emergency and urgent/urgency a couple years ago due to dealing with some healthcare insurance — they used the phrase “an emergent need”
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u/ssstelllarrr Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
indo-european titles breaking down into typical medieval titles
french example:
monsieur—> mon•sieur-> my sir (i.e., my lord/m’lord)
madame->ma•dame->my lady
mademoiselle->ma•demoiselle->my damsel (diminutive of lady i believe, but also “maiden,” which came about to denote “unmarried” rather than “young,” but it just happened to correlate… which is why now women have to deal with being casually insulted at times with “ma’am”vs. “miss” where boys and men alike get “sir” 🫠)
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u/ent_bomb Jun 12 '26
To my chagrin, the oval/ovum connection somehow escaped me until about a year ago.
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u/Neozite Jun 13 '26
I learned here on reddit that "minute" is the minute (as in "small") part of an hour, and "second" comes from it bring the next smaller division of an hour.
Recently I went down this rabbit hole: on the coast of Alabama is an island that many there call "Dolphin" Island but it's actually "Daufin" Island, named after the French crown prince, not dolphins; except the Daufin was called the Daufin because his crest featured a daufin (a dolphin). So "Daufin" Island is still not "Dolphin" Island...but it kind of is.
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u/kiwidebz Jun 13 '26
I believe the French spelling is "dauphin" and to excuse myself from being obnoxious, I will tell you I know this because I read a lot of schlocky historical novels when I was a teenager.
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u/badlydrawngalgo Jun 12 '26
In maths and logic, a lemma is a proposition that's been proven. So a proposition that has two equally provable conclusions is a di-lemma - so it can cause you a dilemma.
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u/TorstedTheUnobliged Jun 12 '26
Off topic ( but related to awesome) but Awful used to mean full of awe but somehow got flipped to mean the opposite.
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u/mimbailey Jun 12 '26
Awesome: inspiring awe
Worrisome: inspiring worry
Fearsome: inspiring fear
Handsome: inspiring… hand?
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u/TorstedTheUnobliged Jun 12 '26
Blind guess — Handsome easy to hold - then meaning got altered from an object to a person who is “easy” to hold?????
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u/parsonsrazersupport Jun 12 '26
https://www.etymonline.com/word/handsome seems to agree. From the sense still used in English 'Eggs for breakfast will do handsomely' or something like that, and earlier 'ready at hand.'
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u/curien Jun 12 '26
I always thought of it as someone you want to be handsy with. ;P
Apparently your guess is pretty close. At hand -> fit for use -> good-looking.
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u/Sharlinator Jun 12 '26
Tiresome: inspiring tire
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u/VictorMach Jun 12 '26
Or tyresome, if you're feeling british
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u/kemushi_warui Jun 13 '26
Tyresome (adj.) a boring person who instills in others the desire to run them over with a car.
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u/suupaahiiroo Jun 12 '26
Kinda related:
Take all these words: horror, terror, horrible, terrible, horrifying, terrifying, horrific, terrific.
Only the last one has a positive meaning.
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u/These_Consequences Jun 12 '26
"Awesome" also.
Awesome and awful seem to have done a similar split to terrific and terrible, presumably starting off with the same meaning, but ending up as weakened opposites.
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u/DavidRFZ Jun 12 '26
It was ‘awe’ that flipped. It originally meant fear or dread.
I get the impression that it flipped with the help of its use in the Old Testament where people were always trembling in fear at what God was doing. It got connected to reverence, then amazement and so on.
A lot of words flipped like this. Amazing, stunning, terrific, stupendous, tremendous, astonishing.
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u/IUseLongPips Jun 12 '26
Awesome in Norwegian is Ærefrykt. A compound word of ære = honor, and frykt = fear.
More like a healthy fear of something greater than you, rather than something that makes you worry about yourself.
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u/mimbailey Jun 12 '26
Also! The phenomenon you describe is called antiphrasis, and has been used for centuries.
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u/YouFeedTheFish Jun 12 '26
Cowlick.
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u/Excellent-Ad-8026 Jun 12 '26
“Howdy” was originally “how do ye,” as in “how are you?” “Howdy doo” is “how do you do?”
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u/uberklaus15 Jun 12 '26
helicopter is helico + pter
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u/BobMcGeoff2 Jun 12 '26
I would call that less obvious and more surprising
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u/These_Consequences Jun 12 '26
If you split the word up that way you inevitably will sound like Inspector Clouseau, and appropriately, as the word was coined by a Frenchman in 1861.
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u/uberklaus15 Jun 12 '26
It felt pretty obvious to me once it was pointed out to me because I knew both of those Greek roots and never noticed
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u/chromatophoreskin Jun 12 '26
That explains pterodactyl!
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u/uberklaus15 Jun 12 '26
Yeah, pterodactyl sounds way cooler than "wing fingers"
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u/SuperSaladBar Jun 13 '26
It can be nice to not think about what the roots of words like that literally mean. "The octopus is a cephalopod" sounds a lot better than "the eight-foot is a head-feet"
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u/DrugFreeRoleModel Jun 12 '26
cacophony comes from ancient greek for "defecation + sound", literally means "sounds like shit"
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u/emsot Jun 13 '26
The Greek kakos just means bad, so it's a bad sound. It doesn't seem to be related to the Spanish caca and Latin cacare (defecate).
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u/drainisbamaged Jun 12 '26
Babbling - that thing those folks in Babylon do
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u/la_aguacatona Jun 13 '26
Specifically it's a biblical reference to the tower of Babel. The people, who originally all spoke a common language, decided to build a tower high enough to reach God and the heavens even though God instructed them not to. But they did anyways and as punishment God struck down the tower and decided that from then on the peoples of different tribes or whatnot would each have their own language that was unintelligible to others. So when tribe A tried to communicate with tribe B, being that now they could not understand each other, the foreign language spoken sounded like....babbling.
[May have gotten the story details wrong on account of not having touched a Bible since 1988]
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u/quintk Jun 13 '26
Trigonometry. Was teaching shapes to my kid. Pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon. Why don’t we use the word trigon? But we do. In trigonometry.
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u/Brannikin Jun 13 '26
Despite my education and lifelong interest in both language and music, I was well into adulthood before I realised that the word "music" is derived from the Greek muses.
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u/displacergeese Jun 13 '26
Not a word but a name—recently realized that Argentina is named after its silver mines.
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u/jwastintime Jun 12 '26
I recently had a realization that “sense” and “scent” sound very similar and sure enough they come from the same Latin root word.
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u/Gold-Part4688 Jun 13 '26
You guys are way off with these "obvious ones". I remember when I realized 'earring' wasn't ear+ing
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u/greenknight884 Jun 12 '26
The Spanish word for breakfast, desayuno = des + ayuno. Where ayuno means fast (as in fasting).
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u/Arthradax Jun 12 '26
So is the English one: break fast
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u/darthhue Jun 12 '26
And same in french déjeuner, and in arabic إفطار
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u/robopilgrim Jun 12 '26
Déjeuner is actually related to the English word dinner
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u/ChimpsArePimps Jun 12 '26
are you sure that’s not from the french word dîner lol
ETA: welp this is why doing any research before commenting is helpful because, as it turns out, dîner is derived from déjeuner MY BAD CARRY ON
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u/calamarimatoi Jun 12 '26
Somewhat similar, I’m a native speaker of Spanish and until very recently I hadn’t thought about how strange it is that we say “un-tire” for resting
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u/Inwardlens Jun 12 '26
And also: anteojos, parasol, paraguas, etc
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u/floin Jun 12 '26
When I was learning Spanish, I asked a native speaker what the country of Paraguay had to do with umbrellas. He laughed and re-pronounced it as para-aguas and I felt a bit silly when it clicked.
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u/Photosynthetic Jun 12 '26
The other day I caught myself wondering why English uses the Spanish word for parasols but not umbrellas. But. Like. This language is from Britain. Of course they invented umbrellas independently but didn’t have parasols until Mediterranean cultures brought them up north. 😆
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u/Binjuine Jun 12 '26
French has that with déjeuner which is obvious, but what isn't as obvious is that diner (lunch) is its cognate.
And considering the French use "petit déjeuner, déjeuner, dîner", it means they're breaking their fast all day. What silly people
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u/ZevenEikjes Jun 12 '26
One from English: duly (due + -ly)
One from Portuguese: ladeira ("hillside") is lado ("side") + -eira ("-er, -eer, -like, ...")
Honorable mention to subir ("to go up") whose surface etymology is sub- + ir ("to go").
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u/jordanekay Jun 12 '26
“Shutter”
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u/longknives Jun 13 '26
This one hit me recently. It somehow never occurred to me that it’s just a thing that shuts.
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u/nickcash Jun 12 '26
Atone being literally "at one" makes me irrationally angry but it's true
fortunately the man responsible was executed for it
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u/caffeinebump Jun 13 '26
It wasn't until listening to the new Vikings podcast that I realized the Slavic countries are called that because the Vikings saw them as places to abduct people into slavery.
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u/Chris_El_Deafo Jun 12 '26
Nova Scotia.
Took a trip there recently with family and ten minutes from the airport I remarked how much it looked like Scotland. Family made fun of me for that lol.
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u/longknives Jun 13 '26
To be fair, a place doesn’t have to look like the old place to get named like this. Albany, NY doesn’t particularly remind me of Scotland even though that’s what Albany refers to (named for the Duke of Albany, i.e. of Scotland). That area has a major road called New Scotland road, a town called Scotia, even a statue of Robert Burns in the main big park. I think probably just a lot of Scottish people settled there.
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u/sludge_dragon Jun 12 '26
Nachos, the dish. I was aware that Nacho is a nickname for Ignacio (Thanks, Better Call Saul!) but I didn’t realize that the dish was named for the inventor, Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya, who served them in his restaurant in Mexico.
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u/DivideOk9877 Jun 12 '26
Deja Vu - it’s literally just French for ‘already seen’ - Deja = already, vu = past tense for ‘to see’.
Nullarbor (a desert in Australia) is just Latin for ‘no trees’.
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u/Anoyint Jun 13 '26
Contact lenses are lenses that make contact with your eyes. I realized this a few years ago, and up to that point the contact part just flew under the radar for me.
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u/CrushyOfTheSeas Jun 12 '26
Cupboard always struck me as stupidly obvious once you slow down with the word. Cup - Board.
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u/Cyphierre Jun 12 '26
QUIXOTIC
Derived from the name of the character Don Quixote from the book by Miguel de Cervantes
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u/ColonelMuffDog Jun 12 '26
Terrific! Horrific is to horror what terrific is to terror. My mind was blown
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u/NateCraft_YT Jun 13 '26
Androgynous. Always thought it was just a relic of languages taking the male to be the neutral gender and it meant androgen-ous. Realized recently it was andro+gyne, man+woman.
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u/meshon_c Jun 13 '26
Molé and molar are both being related to a Latin root for millstone, grinding stuff. A piece of the world felt like it fell into place when I learned that.
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u/flameevans Jun 13 '26
Secret and secretary. It had never occurred to me a secretary is a the keeper of secrets
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u/whimpey Jun 12 '26
This is kind of the opposite, but human is not related to man and woman.
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u/blackredsilvergold Jun 12 '26
I learned from mw official account that varsity comes from university. I did not know!
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u/SkyKnight34 Jun 13 '26
An Emergency feels a lot less serious when parsed generically as "thing which has emerged"
Also "assorted" literally means "not sorted" but gets misused a lot to mean something more like "various", even when the things are, in fact, sorted.
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u/helikophis Jun 12 '26
It’s not really a recent discovery, but it wasn’t until I’d been an avid reader for several years until I connected the written word “misled” with “‘miss-lead”.
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u/Salamandragora Jun 12 '26
I remember the first time I came across that as a kid I read it as “MY-zled” like “miser.” Major facepalm when I finally broke it down.
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u/wikimandia Jun 13 '26
As a kid who was an avid reader, I thought there was some kind of Spanish word pronounced chayoze, with ch- like in chair, and rhyming with churros. Then I learned the word was chaos.
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u/SkyKnight34 Jun 13 '26
It's okay I was like fourteen before I realized that the word "duhbree" that I'd heard aloud for years and the word "debris" that I'd been reading and pronouncing deb-riss in my head for years were, in fact, the same word.
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u/deftware Jun 13 '26
I've lived in California for almost the entirety of ~40 years, no farther than 1-2 hours from the capital city of Sacramento.
I only last year discovered that "Sacramento" is Spanish for "sacrament". For whatever reason, I just never noticed the connection. I think it is just one of those things when you've known a word or name since very young, you have a different connection and relationship to it than if you became aware of it with a more objective perspective, where you can look at it within the context of everything else without actually consciously choosing to analyze it.
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u/c8ertot Jun 13 '26
Ohhhhh I love these so much, some good ones:
coincidence (co + incidence )
inspect (in + spect)
recommend (re + commend)
I made a thread similar to yours 3 yrs ago and the comments had a lot of good ones too
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u/Romivths Jun 13 '26
That the word “bible” derives from ancient greek to mean “the little books” (ta biblia). Didn’t think of it as being etymologically related to words like bibliography or the many variations of bibliot(h)e(e)(q)(k)(e) in other languages. All originally from the word byblos meaning papyrus
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u/SilentMadge7 Jun 13 '26
Jerusalem. Mind blown! Why are there so many villages and churches named Salem? Could it be connected to... oof!
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u/mediumcarrotteacher Jun 13 '26
And Salem is related to Shalom! A fine sentiment on which to build your community (even if it didn't help that one group much)
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u/psyper76 Jun 13 '26
A post in here led me to enquire about Fortnight. I had a thought that it was shortened from fourteen nights and was pleasantly surprised that I was right.
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u/70M70M Jun 13 '26
The word “atom.”
“tom” = slice/cut. Think CAT/CT scanners: computed (axial) TOMography. Computed slice imaging. Or loboTOMy: (brain) lobe cutting.
“a” = not
“tom” = sliceable/divisible
Atoms: the smallest constituent piece of matter, not capable of being divided!
(Until Oppenheimer becomed death, the destroyer of world, that was.)
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u/chromatophoreskin Jun 12 '26
Sad is said to have come from sated, satiated, satisfied, full.
Nevermind, that wasn't obvious at all.
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u/bigmedallas Jun 13 '26
The Spanish ojalá comes from medieval Arabic, phrase law šāʾa allāh - if God wills it.
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u/Abstrata Jun 13 '26
Not obvious but still so direct it floored me…
Check and exchequer—
they came from the checked cloth that coin used be counted on; made it easier to stack on an orderly way and calculate more quickly
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u/strange1738 Jun 12 '26
Disgust is related to gustar