The blog
Phrase histories, myth files & notes
Longer pieces on where phrases come from, how false origins spread, and how the record is actually read.
Myth Files
The rule of thumb story: tracing a myth to its sourceThe claim that "rule of thumb" recalls a wife-beating law is the most repeated false etymology in English. Followed link by link, its paper trail runs…
Sep 7, 2026
Notes
Why We Publish “Origin Unknown”The most honest phrase in our archive is also the least satisfying: origin unknown. Here is why we treat it as a finding rather than a…
Sep 7, 2026
Phrase Histories
Wartime Slang That Outlived the WarWar compresses language the way it compresses everything else, minting words fast and scattering them wide. Some of the twentieth century's most ordinary phrases were forged…
Sep 7, 2026
Phrase Histories
The King James Bible’s Quiet Grip on Everyday SpeechThe 1611 Bible shaped English idiom more than any other book, yet most of its famous phrases are older than 1611. Untangling that paradox means giving…
Sep 7, 2026
Phrase Histories
By and Large: How Sailors Gave English So Much of Its VocabularyCenturies of seafaring left deep watermarks on everyday English, from 'by and large' to 'the bitter end'. But the sea also attracts more origin stories than…
Sep 7, 2026
Phrase Histories
The Phrases Shakespeare Actually Coined — and the Ones He Only PopularisedShakespeare gets credit for half the English language, but a good deal of it was already in circulation. Sorting the minting from the borrowing tells us…
Sep 7, 2026