Phrase histories, myth files & notes

Discover the difference between "break the ice vs cut the cheese" - idioms with unique meanings and uses.

A word coined in a 2023 blog post became a dictionary's Word of the Year within a year. Tracing 'enshittification' shows how fast a coinage can…

The OED's dates carry small signals — a, c, a question mark, a dagger — that most readers skim past. Learning to read them turns a…

We still 'dial' numbers and 'hang up' calls on phones that do neither. Why some metaphors outlive their objects shows how rarely language updates its furniture.

Idioms fade quietly, usually when the object behind them leaves daily life. Surveys and worn-out referents hint at which phrases are going now, and what fills…

Some words do not merely drift; they pivot to the opposite of what they meant. 'Nice' began as an insult and 'awful' as praise, and the…

The Ngram Viewer is a superb tool for tracing how common a word became. It is a poor tool for deciding when a word was born…

A "first recorded use" is not a birth certificate. It is the earliest surviving evidence found so far — and the search behind it is more…

Many of today's most confident word-origin "facts" trace to a single forwarded email from 1999. Here is how a joke became a reference source.

A whole genre of word-origin stories claims old words are secret acronyms. A single date-based rule exposes almost all of them as inventions.