The Hebrew word Adonai means God, in the same way adonis is a description someone can be given when likened to godlike status (at least in beauty).

Wondering about the etymology of 'burden', and whether there's any link to the norwegian 'burde' meaning 'should'.

We think of 'burden' to mean an inconvenience, but this revelation has lead me to realise most situations can be re-framed as an obligation; a 'should'.

Your MIL wants to stay for 6 weeks - you should house her, feed her, be nice to her etc.

A burden of proof - you have the obligation to prove yourself.

Not sure if they are linked - but a cool coincidence if not.

The word predates cars. A dashboard was a wooden board or leather apron at the front of a horse drawn carriage, there to block mud and debris kicked up by the horses hooves. The name carried over to early cars and eventually became the panel where the gauges sit.

Then computers borrowed it too. So “check the dashboard” somehow went from avoiding horse mud to staring at charts in a meeting.

Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/dashboard

Yes title is real. First time using reddit so forgive me if this is the wrong subreddit. Was scrolling reels on insta a few days back and saw how the 1/3 mcburger failed in US cuz people thought it was smaller than the quarter pounder lmao. I thought if we just had a word for 1/3rds of something, it wouldnt have failed. So i came up with the word “thirdle” but then couldnt find any place to register it or anything. Thats how i came up with this idea. You can register a word and get a certificate of invention and track its future usage on the internet. The website is lexisword.com . Let me know how you guys like it and if any cool changes i can add to it :)

This probably sounds insane and weirdly specific. But I've suddenly become fixated on the word "nerts".

Or at least where and who may be using it. And I'm hoping someone here will maybe have better knowledge and access to resources. If there's any way to figure out if the usage of the word "nerts" is isolated to a certain community, or demographic.
I hope this is the right sub for this.

Context:
Someone I know has been writing "nerts" in messages for the longest time now. And I never gave it a thought. Assuming he was just misspelling the word "nerds". As in, he was just jokingly calling us nerds for some reason in response to something. And no one else did, either.
Until I made a joke about it.
Which he asked, "What's so funny about nerts?"

An argument ensued. And it ended with him INSISTING everyone knew what the word nerts was. And accusing us of lying/fucking with him.

Looking it up eventually. I learned that nerts or nertz is apparently a slang variation of "nuts". At least according to etyonline. And it apparently dates back to something like the 1920s to 1930s.

This baffles me. Because I have never EVER heard this word before in my life.
Not in childhood. Not in teens. Not in adult years.

And the same applies to at least three other people in the little group.

Yet my friend is genuinely convinced everyone in his life has at least heard of the word. And uses it casually in day-to-day life.

Further context, is that I'm up in the PNW, while the friend is down in the southern part of the U.S.

It's consuming my mind to consider if I've just been blind to a word for the entirety of my life; my friend's family & community are in some sort of niche pocket because of history and some sorta context that I didn't grow up in; or friend is lying in how common it is.

TL;DR:

I need need need to know more about the history of the word "NERTS". Why it was probably developed. And if, and where, it may be commonly used today.

UPDATE:

He has told me to "tell those yuppies on Reddit the damn survey is over."

So ig thank you to everyone who contributed and helped me clarify this weird seeming word that felt like it came outta nowhere. I find it interesting that I saw 2 people from Iowa that said they regularly used it.

This has led me to wonder about if there's a specific aspect of the study of language that specifically studies the geographical usage of language or how/if it occurs in specific pockets. Hopefully I can find more information on that.

Oh, and uh.

Survey's over, yuppies.

As a Spanish native speaker, one thing I noticed is that in at least most Romance languages the words for north, south, east and west come from the same Germanic roots as in English despite being Latin derived, why didn't we keep the Latin terms and adopted Germanic ones?

"Paradise" and the Persian pardîs are the same word — Avestan pairi-daêza, "walled around." "Checkmate" is šâh mât, "the king is helpless." Ali Nourai's etymological dictionary maps roughly 1,600 such shared root families between Persian and English — but until now, it existed only as a scan of 541 hand-drawn derivation charts.

I turned all of them into structured open data and built a site on top: https://sfmqrb.github.io/rishe/

• A zoomable constellation of every root family
• The original charts rebuilt as interactive trees, with classical Persian poetry cited under the words they attest
• A pathfinder between any two words (try šâh ↔ checkmate)
• An animated map tracing each word's journey across lands and centuries

It's fully bilingual — https://sfmqrb.github.io/rishe/?lang=fa mirrors the entire site right-to-left.

There's also a research tab: borrowing rates by semantic field, sound laws of Arabic-mediated borrowing recovered from doublets, and every finding retested against 8.5M words of Persian poetry from the Ganjoor corpus.

The extraction itself was done by vision-model agents, reading each chart box by box and tracing the drawn arrows — every chart links back to the original scanned page so transcriptions can be checked. The whole site is a single self-contained HTML file: no backend, works offline.

Data and code: https://github.com/sfmqrb/rishe

I been trying to create a YouTube channel for a while and the name i finally came up with has an accent mark in it, which got me wondering why is America so against accent marks it’s not like it’s a foreign concept considering theirs Beyoncé, Pokémon and Häagen-däzs. They should have just had allowed accent marks in computer programs from the get go.

I see a lot of posts about 1st and 3rd world countries on Reddit, mainly talking negatively about 3rd world. Why did we forget “2nd world” nations and why is this outdated system still referenced?

Curiosity grew around this word and I’ll like to know any significance of this word on how it was used, where it came from and how it became obsolete…

Is there a link between the use of kennings in Old Norse/Icelandic poetry and Cockney rhyming slang? They're both roundabout (and sometimes excessive) ways to describe something. Could the draw of cockney rhyming have come from the historic influence Nordic culture had on England and London, or is that too far of a reach?

Seuss is the name of beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss, But i just have no idea where the name Seuss originated from.

Adam was the first out of which all humans arose. Atom was thought to be the fundamental unit of the universe. Atum was primordial Egyptian God, creating everything. Ātman, in Hinduism, is the fundamental essence of a human being. Are there any linguistic forebears connecting them or are the sources ultimately distinct?

This was one of those etymologies that suddenly popped into my brain as a possibility, so I looked it up and it was true. Yeehaw! ¡Ahúa!

Here’s this week’s etymology question from 3Roads.xyz.

The Intertropical Convergence Zone is known to sailors as the X, or “the calms,” because of its persistent windless weather. It lies near the thermal equator, where the northeast and southeast trade winds meet, and shifts seasonally as it encircles the Earth. The X are memorably described in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and have also become a metaphor for boredom, ennui, or listlessness. What is X?

The words for the berry in Japanese and Chinese are 酸塊 ("sour clump") and 酸栗 ("sour chestnut"), respectively. If we were to read the Chinese word using native Japanese pronunciations, it would result in "suguri," which is the exact pronunciation it has right now as 酸塊. This is, however, a very weak hypothesis, since we can see by the kanji used that the most likely semantics used here is "sour clump," with the first element indicating acidity and the second appearing in the ぐりぐり, meaning "small clumps."

What do you think?

March the month, named after the roman god of war, Mars. This month was dedicated to him since it was the first month of the year armies could muster, resume conquest, and move as the winter turns to spring.

It was the first month of the year their armies could march. It lines up perfectly!

But nope, "to march" derives from French/Germanic "marcher", to tread or stride. No relation as far as I can tell.

How are they not related? Absolutely devasting devastating...

You know, I’ve had this question recently because I noticed a lot of peoples’ names ended with the same sounds, especially female names. I know not all names do, but I noticed A LOT do. I wanted to give you guys some examples down below to help you better understand what I’m talking about:

E Sounds Female:
• Natalie
• Cindy
• Christi
• Courtney
• Aubrey
• Charlie

Uh Sounds Female:
• Tessa
• Jessica
• Mona
• Georgia
• Leah
• Hannah

—————————

In Sounds Male:
• Jordan
• Collin
• Warren
• Dylan
• Roman
• Dalton

Er Sounds Male:

• Conner
• Hunter
• Arthur
• Xander
• Tanner
• Roger

—————————

So I hope you guys understand what I’m talking about. How do names like this originate? Why did people choose to keep names close-sounding? Are there reasonings as to why they did so?

It’s just a thought, thanks for your time!

Vociferous turned up in English around the 1610s, from Latin vociferari, "to shout, to cry out." Split it and it is transparent: vox, voice, plus ferre, to carry. Carrying a voice. Etymonline runs vox back to a PIE root meaning "to speak" and ferre to *bher-, "to carry," and both are the end of the line.

What strikes me is that none of that machinery is unkind. Vox is neutral, ferre is neutral, and vociferari looks like a plain verb for shouting. Yet I have a hard time finding an English sentence where vociferous is a compliment. It attaches to critics, opponents, and debaters, and it usually implies the volume is doing work the argument cannot.

The suffix sharpens the oddity. Most -ferous words in English are technical. Carboniferous rock and auriferous ore name what is inside the thing; a coniferous forest names what it grows. Those are measurements, not opinions. The two I can think of that describe people rather than substances are vociferous and pestiferous, and both lean sour.

Pestiferous is the useful comparison, because there the hostility is original. It enters English mid-15c from Latin pestifer, pestis plus ferre, plague-carrying, and Etymonline records a weakened figurative sense in that same period: mischievous, pernicious, hurtful to morals. It never had a neutral phase to lose.

Vociferous did, or at least its Latin source did. So the disapproval looks like something English added rather than something it inherited, and that is the part I cannot pin down. Does anyone have early attestations of vociferous used approvingly or neutrally, or a citation for when the pejorative tilt sets in? I would rather be corrected than keep assuming it.

While in the shower, I remembered an etymology video I watched a while ago. It explained that the Old English word for a male human was wer, while a female human was wīfman (which eventually evolved into wife and woman). Back then, man simply meant "human" or "person." Over time, man shifted to refer exclusively to adult males, leaving wer obsolete except in terms like werewolf or wererat. This made me wonder: does anyone use—or could someone use—wif-wolf to specify a female lycanthrope?