English dictionary, thesaurus, translations & etymology

Etymology — The Origins of English Words

Where do words come from? Trace the origin and history of any English word, from its Latin, Greek or Old English roots through to its modern meaning. Every etymology is sourced.

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From un- 'reverse the action of' plus scramble.

From un- 'not' plus cured, in the food sense of preserving with salt, smoke or nitrates.

From un- 'not' plus circumcise, from Latin circumcidere 'to cut around'.

From Latin ubique, meaning 'everywhere'.

From the verb twerk, which arose in the New Orleans bounce music scene around 1990. The word is generally taken to be a blend of twist or twitch with jerk, though the derivation is not settled.

An initialism of text to speech.

An initialism with several unrelated expansions.

An initialism with several unrelated expansions.

An initialism of Transportation Security Administration, a US federal agency created after the attacks of 11 September 2001.

A compound of trophy, in the sense of a prize put on display, and wife. Trophy comes via French trophée from Greek tropaion, a monument raised at the spot where an enemy was routed.

From Middle Dutch trisen, "to hoist", related to trise, a pulley. The noun originally meant a single pull or tug on a rope, and from "at one pull" came the sense of a single instant.

From Latin trans- "across, through" and spirare "to breathe", via French transpirer. The original English sense was the botanical one of vapour passing through a surface, from which the figurative sense of information leaking out developed.

An initialism of thermoplastic elastomer in its principal sense.

From toll + -free. Compare Saterland Frisian tolfräi (“toll-free”), West Frisian tolfrij (“toll-free”), Dutch tolvrij (“toll-free”), German zollfrei (“toll-free”), Swedish tullfri (“toll-free”), Norwegian tollfri (“toll-free”).

From toilet + bowl.

An abbreviation of trinitrotoluene, from tri- "three", nitro- (the nitro chemical group) and toluene, the aromatic hydrocarbon it is made from.

An initialism with several unrelated expansions.

An initialism, standing for different phrases in different fields.

A compound of thug and life. Thug entered English from Hindi ṭhag, "swindler, cheat", originally naming a class of robbers in India. The phrase itself is inseparable from Tupac Shakur, who wore it as a tattoo and used it as the name of a group and an acronym he glossed politically; it spread from mid-1990s American hip-hop.

From Middle English, literally "bare down to the thread": cloth worn until the nap is gone and only the woven threads remain.

third world country

A translation of French tiers monde, "third world", used during the Cold War to distinguish nations aligned with neither the Western nor the Soviet bloc. The economic meaning developed later, as most non-aligned states were poor.

From a common format for specifying gender-neutral pronouns in online profiles.

From Middle English thanke yow; as with thank God, praise be to God, and praise the Lord, it was originally a present subjunctive form but is usually not parsed that way in current usage. It has also sometimes been parsed as a prodrop form of (present indicative) I thank you, a mechanism that may plausibly coexist with the other one (instances being variable).

An initialism of 'the fuck', clipped from 'what the fuck'.