OXFORD DICTIONARY OF WORD ORIGINS by Third Edition

Published by Julia Cresswell

The origins of words are endlessly fascinating. I had no idea that “milliner” is a word-from-place like “cashmere” (from Kashmir) and “paisley” (from... well… Paisley). The original milliners were sellers of fancy goods from Milan. Or take this: in the Middle Ages “junk” meant old or inferior rope. By the nineteenth century it meant rubbish. In the early twentieth century it acquired a slang sense to mean heroin and other narcotics – hence “junkie”.

There’s a great deal of this sort of thing in the new paperback edition of Julia Cresswell’s Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. It is arranged alphabetically from “aardwark” (South African English) to “zoom” which she links to “zip” and all to do with high speed (1920s – with the Zoom app we all know and love arriving in 2014).

There’s an interesting introduction about how words appear, develop and change and useful notes on prefixes and suffixes to show how word building works. The -en makes nouns and adjectives into verbs (“deepen”) or adjectives into nouns (“woollen”), for instance. Pen- from Latin means almost, as in “peninsula” or “penultimate”.

I also like very much the panels she includes on subjects such as acronyms (“quango”, “nimby”), Indian words (“gymkana,” “thug”), eponyms (“boycott”, “diesel”) and a lot more.

There is an idea for an entertaining English lesson on almost every page. The more we understand the words we hear and read the better equipped we are to use them well.