A commonplace book of words

EtyBites

Half-minute etymologies, weekly

Every word in your everyday speech has travelled. It came from somewhere, often from somewhere unexpected, and was passed along by people who never met one another — through trade routes, through marriages, through misunderstandings, through poems and through laundry lists. EtyBites is a small book of those journeys, told one word at a time, in the time it takes you to drink half a cup of tea.

Each week, one common English word is traced back to where it actually comes from — not the popular myth about it, and not the half-remembered Latin from school, but the version a careful philologist would defend. The clip is around thirty seconds. The aim is to leave you with one good story about a word you've already used today.

A philologist is, by happy accident, a "lover of words" — from the Greek philos (loving) and logos (word, speech, reason). The word has been doing this same self-describing thing since at least the sixteenth century.

Recent words

  1. salary

    From Latin salarium — literally "salt money," the allowance given to Roman soldiers for the purchase of salt. The phrase "worth one's salt" is not metaphor; it is bookkeeping.

    Episode i · Latin · 0:28
  2. muscle

    From the Latin musculus — "little mouse" — because someone, somewhere, watching a biceps flex, thought it resembled a small creature darting under the skin. We have called our strength rodents ever since.

    Episode ii · Latin via Old French · 0:31
  3. disaster

    From the Italian disastro, a star (astro) gone wrong (dis-). The original sense was astrological: an ill-favoured planetary alignment. We keep the word; we have outgrown the astrology.

    Episode iii · Italian · 0:34
  4. avocado

    From the Nahuatl āhuacatl, the original word the Aztecs used for the fruit. The same word served, by a piece of fruit-shaped logic, as a euphemism for a particular part of the male anatomy. The euphemism has fallen out of the menu; the fruit remains.

    Episode iv · Nahuatl via Spanish · 0:29
  5. clue

    From clew, the Middle English word for a ball of yarn — specifically the one Theseus unwound through the labyrinth to find his way back out. A "clue" is, etymologically, a thread you can follow home.

    Episode v · Old English · 0:32

Future episodes are published each Sunday on TikTok. The handle will be added here when the account opens its doors.

What this is, and isn't

EtyBites is a small project run by someone who loves the slow accumulation of meaning that languages do over centuries, and who thinks the etymology of a word is often more interesting than the word's current dictionary entry suggests. Each clip is one word, one journey, one paragraph of the kind of detail that doesn't fit on a school flashcard.

It is not a linguistics course, nor a dictionary, nor a parade of "did you know" facts. Where the etymology of a word is contested, the clip says so. Where a popular folk-etymology persists despite being wrong, the clip names both versions and lets the audience leave with the corrected one.

If you write to us

Suggested words, corrections, friendly disagreements about Proto-Indo-European reconstructions:
contact@etybites.com